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Hampton Court
Over its 500 year history this was a royal palace for over 200 years from the Tudor through the Stuart and into the Hanover period. Each successive period saw the house and gardens develop with the combination of great wealth and a need to impress. At this time the monarchy set the style and the…
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Chatsworth House
One of the most famous gardens in England due to having to of its most impressive water features the Cascade and the Emperor Fountain. There is much more to the gardens than these and you could easily spend a full day going around the gardens and still not see it all. When you do go…
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Giverny
This was the home of the painter Claude Monet for the last 43 years of his 89 year live and features in many of the most important paintings of the impressionist movement. Though now preserved due to its importance it was very much the product of a passionate gardener. The garden and his work as…
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Great Dixter
This was the home of one of the last centuries greatest garden thinks and writers, centred on a property remodelled and extended by Edward Luytens for his parents this was the lifelong home of Christopher Lloyd. Though initially he inherited the garden from his parents it became the practical extension of Lloyds thought experiments in…
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Hidcote Manor
Lawrence Johnson spent 41 years creating what is the most famous garden of the Arts and Crafts movement and one of the most inspirational gardens of all time. Much is made of the way the garden is divided into rooms, and this has led to many gardens trying to use this technique to create a…
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Hillier Gardens
This garden started out as a small garden around the home of the late Sir Harold Hillier, of Hillier Nurseries. Here he set out to create as large a collection of woody plants that could be grown outdoors in southern England as he could and as the head of Hillier Nurseries, with its vast plant…
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Inverewe Garden
In 1862 the Mackenzie family purchased the 2000 acre Inverewe estate on the North West coast of Scotland and the 20 year old Osgood Mackenzie started to make himself a garden. He chose his site well; though 57° 46’ north, and so north of Inverness, the location benefits from the warming effect of the Gulf…
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Kiplin Hall
Built in the 1620’s, the hall it is typically Tudor in appearance, and occupied up to middle of the 20th century by which time the house and gardens were derelict. The gardens themselves did not appear to be developed until the end of the 18th century when the road was moved away from the house…
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Nymans
Ludwig Messel’s Sussex garden was and still is more about plants than design. When Ludwig purchased the estate in 1890 the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway had built up a large network of railway lines covering the Sussex making the area an easy weekend commute from London and a depressed agricultural sector (caused at…
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Les Jardins du Manoir d’Eyrignac
The most remarkable thing about this garden is how young it is. I have often been faced with the modern demand for instant gardens resulting in the only hedges being of the much over used leyandii conifers and the problems they can cause. Yet in the early 1960s Gilles Sermadiras de Pouzols de Lille, with…
