A garden is an ideal place to spend a sunny afternoon, but would you fly across the world for the pleasure of doing so? Which gardens are worthy of such a journey? To answer that question — and define what makes a garden truly spectacular — we assembled a panel of six horticultural experts for the latest installment of our T25 series. Louis Benech is one of France’s best-known landscape designers, part of the team responsible for the much-praised 1990 overhaul of the Tuileries in Paris. In 2016, the Sussex, England-based garden designer Juliet Sargeant became the first Black woman to have a show garden at the Chelsea Flower Show, where she won a Royal Horticultural Society gold medal. Tim Richardson, who lives in London, writes about gardens for numerous publications and is the author of 22 books on the subject. Before founding Domino magazine and serving as T’s editor in chief from 2012 to 2016, Deborah Needleman spent many years as a garden editor at House & Garden. She also maintains an impressive plot at her home in upstate New York. The Japanese-born, New York-based architect and plant lover Toshiko Mori is an architecture professor at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, where she focuses on sustainability. And Tom Delavan is T’s design director, as well as an interior decorator and green thumb.
Each panelist was asked to nominate 10 must-see gardens and, on a video call in March, they spent almost four hours winnowing down that long list to a definitive 25. Most, if not all of them, are open to the public, with some requiring reservations or other advance planning. Only eight of the 51 finalists were suggested by more than one jurist, making for some lively debate: All agreed, for example, that the Dubai Miracle Garden, a flower-encrusted theme park that includes, among other spectacles, a nearly 60-foot-tall Mickey Mouse topiary, uses unconscionable amounts of water and includes no native plants. But Sargeant, who suggested its inclusion, pointed out the project’s mass appeal. Though it was ultimately crossed off, with one panelist deeming the place “deeply immoral” and another calling it “honestly disgusting,” all agreed that it raised important issues, earning it a mention here.
Gardens from 20 countries were nominated, with Italy and the United Kingdom coming out on top; each ended up with five on the final list, followed by France with four. Unsurprisingly, the panel was particularly interested in the differences among the styles favored by various cultures, from meticulously groomed Asian stroll gardens to more naturalistic English cottage borders. The impact of colonialism on landscape design was also a topic of discussion, as was the focus on native plants in several African, South American and Australian projects. A few gardens were disqualified for practical reasons: The owners of one eccentric, privately owned sculpture garden in Britain, for example, asked to be left off the list for fear of overcrowding. Others, like Claude Monet’s Giverny in France, were deemed too obvious or too packed with tourists to wholeheartedly recommend. Ultimately, while the jurists have all traveled extensively, visiting gardens around the world, none of them had seen, or even heard of, every nomination. In some instances, they had to defer to their fellow experts and take a leap of faith — something that, as gardeners, they’re well accustomed to doing. A garden, said the British horticulturist Gertrude Jekyll (1843-1932), who designed one of the gardens in our top 25, “teaches entire trust.” — Alexa Brazilian
This conversation has been edited and condensed. Though numbered, the entries below aren’t ranked; the gardens appear roughly in the order in which they were discussed.
In 1930, when the English writer Vita Sackville-West first came to Sissinghurst, a 16th-century Tudor manor set on 460 acres in Kent, she “fell in love; love at first sight,” she later explained, likening the place to “Sleeping Beauty’s castle.” She’d been searching for a property that would match the romance of her childhood home, Knole, just outside the nearby town of Sevenoaks, which she was prohibited from inheriting as a woman (an injustice that inspired her lover, Virginia Woolf, to write “Orlando” in 1928). Though Sissinghurst was overgrown, Sackville-West saw its potential and, with her husband, the writer and diplomat Harold Nicolson, set about creating what is now arguably England’s premier garden of rooms. Nicolson imposed a framework of crisp yew hedges that enclose each space and added an avenue of espaliered linden trees underplanted with spring bulbs. His formality was the perfect counterpoint to his wife’s love of romantic blooms, old roses and color-themed borders. Best of all, perhaps, is her White Garden, with rambling roses, spiky Miss Willmott’s ghost, delphiniums and lupines, all of which burst into pale flower near the beginning of June. Nearby, there’s a picturesque fruit orchard enclosed by a moat. Still, not all of the couple’s undertakings had fairy-tale endings. In the 1930s, after visiting the Cycladic island of Delos, they attempted to plant a Greek-style garden but were eventually defeated by the combination of English weather and poor drainage. In 2021, the British landscape architect Dan Pearson — in cooperation with the National Trust, which took over care of the property in 1967, five years after Sackville-West’s death — recreated the Delos garden, where Mediterranean plants like cypress and fig trees now flourish among gravel paths, craggy boulders and reclaimed stone columns. — Clare Coulson
Louis Benech: I believe it was one of the first places where planting whole gardens in one color was done. Every time you go, there are little changes, but the original plan is properly respected.
Deborah Needleman: It’s a remarkable series of different kinds of landscapes: a pond, a woodland, flower borders and a cottage garden. The White Garden is iconic; I happened to be there the week that it was peaking, and it was the most sublime thing I ever saw. And it’s probably the most famous English garden there is.
Tim Richardson: The white garden is the most copied garden anywhere — although it didn’t start as a white garden but as a green, silver and gray garden. It’s designed to be seen at night because it’s next to the Priest House, where they would have dinner. Sissinghurst is really about this couple and their life together, which was very unusual. Both of them had a queer sensibility, both of them had lots of other relationships, but their own relationship was most important to them and the garden was sort of a third party in that.
The longtime family home of the garden writer and horticulturalist Christopher Lloyd, Great Dixter, in East Sussex, dates back to the 15th century but was reconfigured in the early 20th century by the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens at the behest of Lloyd’s father, Nathaniel. The pair also worked together to create the estate’s six-acre garden, which has continued to evolve. Today, the property includes wildflower meadows; a 150-foot border of intensely colorful flowering shrubs, perennials and bulbs; a kitchen garden; the Sunk Garden (a flower-filled courtyard centered on an octagonal pond); the Old Rose Garden (now filled with exotic plants); and the Peacock Garden, where eighteen huge yew topiary birds preside over colorful thalictrums, asters, teasels and grasses. Under the leadership of head gardener Fergus Garrett, who arrived in 1993, Great Dixter, which is now owned by a charitable trust, functions as a garden laboratory, where new ideas are tested, generations of gardeners are trained and wide-ranging research is carried out. A major ecological survey over the past decade, for example, recorded a combined 2,400 species of flora and fauna across the 72-acre estate. The ecologist and entomologist Andy Phillips, who coordinated the project, described Dixter as one of the richest sites he’d ever encountered. — C.C.
Needleman: To me, it’s the quintessential cottage garden in that it’s meant to appear natural, but is anything but.
Richardson: It’s the most intense horticultural garden in the world, I would say. It’s like a monastery, with Fergus Garrett, who runs it, as a kind of horticultural, radical abbot presiding over these novices who live there and meet him every morning at dawn to be assigned their chores. Every year there are maybe 20 or 30 people from all over the world who do this and then they go out and become the greatest gardeners. It’s where the most top-notch gardening is being taught and practiced.
Juliet Sargeant: For the home gardener, the wonderful thing about Great Dixter is that it encourages you to be bold and to try your own thing.
Needleman: I’d love to be able to visit Dixter in the spring when the fritillaria meadows are in bloom. That’s something I want to see at least once in my life.
Built on the ruins of a medieval citadel laid out along the river that shares its name, Ninfa was abandoned by its owners, the noble Caetani family, around the 14th century. The property, just south of Rome, was virtually a swampland when a descendant, Prince Gelasio Caetani — a politician and horticultural enthusiast — inherited the place in 1921 and began planting among the ruins. Caetani’s aristocratic English mother, Ada Bootle-Wilbraham, was a hands-on gardener who installed the roses (tea-scented climbers and delicate noisettes) that now scramble over the crumbling walls, and successive generations of the family have added exquisite flowering trees, including dogwood, magnolia (of which there are nineteen varieties) and several wisterias in white, lilac and pink. Ninfa’s proximity to the water creates a lush microclimate (in addition to the river, there’s a lake on-site), allowing the 20 acres to flourish even through searing Italian summers. In the 1980s, Ninfa became a trust and, until his recent retirement, it was overseen by the family’s former gardener Lauro Marchetti, who preserved the integrity of the garden and its ancient beauty. — C.C.
Needleman: You really get a sense of the layers of history. It’s the kind of site that the 18th- and 19th-century English landscape designers were trying to create when they built faux ruins and follies and hermitages — but this is real.
Benech: It’s a complete atmosphere. When you see the wisteria growing through the stones, you’re scared in some way — it’s probably a good thing to wear a hard hat! But there’s a mixture of abandoned nature and extremely well-kept aspects, too. It’s the kind of garden you would never be able to copy —
Needleman: Unless you have your own ruined medieval village.
The Belgian landscape designer Jacques Wirtz was known for his carefully conceived, impeccably manicured gardens, like the one at the fashion designer Valentino Garavini’s Château de Wideville, outside Paris, where precisely shaped, spiraling mounds of yew dot the closely clipped lawn and low, sharp-edged hedges surround the geometric flower beds. His own garden, however, evolved partially by accident. In the 1970s, he moved to a cottage outside his native Antwerp, intending to use the walled, four-acre outdoor space as a nursery, with stock beds holding plants he’d eventually incorporate into others’ projects. Once the specimens were in place, Wirtz — who’d been deeply inspired by Japanese topiary while working on the Belgian pavilion at the 1970 World Expo in Osaka — began shaping them into cubes, domes, balls and lollipops. In the end, he opted to leave his creations in place, where they remain today, lined up in their neat grids. Once part of a larger 18th-century estate, the property had long paths edged in neglected boxwoods and Wirtz pruned those, too, transforming them into epic, undulating hedges. The trees and shrubs — many of them evergreens — are the garden’s main event, and when flowers do appear they’re also arranged in regimented blocks, like rows of vegetables. Although green is the predominant color here, autumn brings fiery foliage on the apple, pear and plum trees. Left in their natural form, they also provide some softness to balance Wirtz’s impeccably groomed interventions. — C.C.
Tom Delavan: When Wirtz first bought the property, it was a mess and the boxwoods were damaged in such a way that he had to trim them back. That’s how he came up with these boxwood clouds, which I love.
Benech: It was a question of how to coiffer an old lady — and the result is fabulous.
In 1339, Muso Kokushi, a Buddhist high priest and master gardener, created what’s believed to be the first-ever karesansui (dry landscape), at the Saihoji Temple in southwestern Kyoto. The style, characterized by carefully placed rocks and swaths of sand or gravel raked to invoke rippling water, is now considered the archetypal Japanese landscape, often referred to in English as a Zen garden. In the nineteenth century, Saihoji was flooded repeatedly when a nearby river overflowed its banks. The temple and its roughly eight-and-a-half-acre grounds were devastated, with soggy conditions allowing moss to take over. Rather than fight nature, the monks embraced change, and today, Saihoji is best known for its incomparable collection of fuzzy, rootless bryophytes, which grow with wild abandon over both the garden and the temple. With more than 120 varieties in total, specimens include Pyrrhobryum dozyanum, with elongated phyllids resembling weasels’ tails; fluffy, cushionlike Leucobryum glaucum; and Sphagnum palustre, a pale, rosy-tinged bog moss. Saihoji looks quite different than it did in Kokushi’s day, but, in the hands of the monks who continue to maintain it, its purpose of encouraging serenity and contemplation hasn’t changed. To get into the right mind-set, visitors, permitted by reservation only, are invited to take part in the Buddhist devotional practice of copying out sutras in the temple before exploring the plush, viridescent grounds. — Johanna Silver
Toshiko Mori: This garden is very interesting in that it’s part of a spiritual practice: It’s used for meditation. Moss is very tiny, and being in the garden, looking so closely to distinguish one type from another, requires a special kind of attention. It opens up a completely different kind of universe.
Needleman: This is the garden I’d like to die in. It would be amazing to be on that moss.
Melbourne already had a long-established world-class botanical garden — the Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria (which dates to the 1840s) when, in the mid-20th century, local groups concerned about the environmental effects of creeping overdevelopment began laying the groundwork for this one, about 35 miles southeast of the city center. Completed in 2012, it’s now the largest garden devoted to Australian plants in the world. An award-winning example of contemporary landscape design, with a bold, graphic layout that incorporates large-scale contemporary art, Cranbourne is centered around the 60-acre Australian Garden, a landscape of ponds and walkways on the site of a former sand quarry that’s divided into 22 separate zones. The largest, the Red Sand Garden, features circles of saltbush and is home to “Ephemeral Lake,” a 2004 ceramic installation by the artists Edwina Kearney and Mark Stoner. Nearby, the Peppermint Garden highlights aromatic plants like pinnate goodenia, a perennial herb with pink and purple flowers, and Ziera adenophora, an endangered flowering shrub. The Weird and Wonderful Garden, meanwhile, brings together specimens with strange foliage or unusual shapes, including the Queensland bottle tree, with its pear-shaped trunk, and the leafless rock wattle, with its dense tangle of stems. But as beautiful as these planted areas might be, what surrounds the garden is just as impressive — more than 800 acres of preserved bushland with six miles of walking trails and protected habitats for more than 25 threatened plant species as well as bandicoots, kangaroos and koalas. — Clare Foster
Richardson: It’s more like visiting a zoological garden than a botanical garden because some of the plants are the size of large animals — they’re massive!
Needleman: I don’t know anything about it, but I wrote in my notes, “It looks more like a zoo than a garden.”
Richardson: It’s a bit like the High Line [in New York City; see No. 8] in that you walk around this circle and there are different zones and areas you pass through. It’s episodic.
Located in the middle of Sydney, with spectacular views of the harbor and the opera house, this remains one of the city’s best-loved community spaces. Established in 1816 by Lachlan Macquarie, then the governor of New South Wales, it’s home to more than 5,000 species, including both colorful European-style flowers and wild-growing Australian plants like lilly pillies (flowering evergreen shrubs), acacias (known there as wattles) and gum trees (a.k.a. eucalyptus.) The 74-acre property also includes gardens dedicated to succulents, roses, herbs, palms and native Asian species. One particular highlight: the Cadi Jam Ora (First Encounters) Garden, which uses both words and flora to tell the story of the Gadigal people, who were the original custodians of this land. The native grass tree, which had huge cultural significance as a source of both tools and shelter, is featured prominently in this section, while elsewhere one can see native plants like the tropical giant fern — with fronds that can stretch up to 20 feet — and the Wollemi pine, one of the rarest and most ancient trees of the world, with fewer than 100 adult specimens known to exist in the wild and a history dating back more than 90 million years. — C.F.
Mori: I wanted to have at least one garden that’s part of the life of a city and this one is right on the harbor, connecting the Opera House and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, so you can just stroll through on your way to work. It’s also the oldest scientific institution in Australia, with an amazing number of species. And 88 percent of what they have in Australia can’t be found in any other place on the planet! There are plants from the first British fleet, which was the beginning of colonialism, as well as Aboriginal gardens, so you can distinguish between what came with colonial influence and what was already there.
Benech: But there are plenty of botanical gardens that are part of a city; you could say the same thing about the Copenhagen Botanical Garden. What I love here is that the Australian flora are so interesting — I imagine there are so many plants that haven’t even been identified.
Mori: I walked through this garden with [the American landscape architect] Kathryn Gustafson a number of times, and there were many species that even she didn’t know. There’s constant discovery.
When the elevated public park opened in 2009, organizers predicted about 300,000 people would visit in the first year. In fact, closer to 1.7 million passed through — and today the unticketed attraction draws roughly six million annually. Built into defunct, elevated train tracks along Manhattan’s West Side (after a massive fund-raising effort spearheaded by the nonprofit Friends of the High Line), the garden features native, drought-tolerant species. Its Dutch designer, Piet Oudolf, also took inspiration from the wild-growing grasses, shrubs and small trees that arrived during the three decades, beginning in 1980, that the railroad sat abandoned. Designed to be visually interesting throughout all four seasons, the gardens are elegantly framed by narrow concrete planks that form walkways through the plantings, peeling up from the ground now and again to form benches for resting and people-watching. A decade and a half after its establishment, the High Line still feels like a new kind of garden, 30 feet above the streets of New York. Plus, as a model of urban ecology, it has been massively influential: In New York City alone, nearby Little Island in Chelsea as well as parts of the Brooklyn Waterfront Greenway and the Green-Wood Cemetery lawns all bear its rough-edged imprint. — Kendra Wilson
Delavan: Apart from the actual garden itself, which has become one of the most important tourist attractions in the city, it’s really changed that whole section of New York.
Sargeant: I don’t know very much at all about it, but I have heard slightly political rumblings. Can anybody enlighten us on that?
Delavan: Some of the people who were living there were pushed out after the High Line made the neighborhood popular. Now it’s a very gentrified, expensive place. The founders apologized and said, “We were trying to serve the community.” But in the end —
Needleman: They were too successful. I mean, that’s the story of Manhattan. It’s not unique to the High Line, but the High Line made it happen very quickly.
Mori: The landscape is very sustainable though. It has a drainage system that captures rainwater and reuses it, so maintenance is quite minimal. And there’s a symbiosis in the type of species that were planted together: They help each other survive.
Richardson: It blends the two most important movements in landscape architecture and design over the past 30 years or so: postindustrialism — in this case, making a disused railway line into a park — and the naturalistic planting movement. For my money, this is the most influential piece of landscape architecture that’s been created in the past 40 years.
While native gardening has only recently become mainstream in the United States, the concept is nothing new in South Africa. Case in point: this botanical garden in the Western Cape province, the first of its kind in the world dedicated entirely to indigenous flora, which was established over a century ago in 1913. Located eight miles outside the city center and set against the backdrop of Table Mountain’s eastern slope, the 1,305-acre public space showcases more than 7,000 species, with high priority given to the singular fynbos biome, which is found almost exclusively in the country’s Western Cape region and includes stiff, structured proteas, shaggy, flowering ericas and tufted, reedlike plants called restios. There’s also a robust collection of spiky cycads, a type of seed plant some believe predates the dinosaurs, and visitors might also spot local fauna, including brilliantly colored sunbirds — which resemble hummingbirds — owls and wildcats. The Tree Canopy Walkway, a curved, steel-and-timber treetop bridge inspired by a snake’s skeleton, winds 65 feet above it all, offering mountain vistas and sweeping forest views. — J.S.
Mori: They’ve been collecting indigenous plants that you can’t see anywhere else since the early 20th century, so it’s very significant. And the setting right by Table Rock Mountain is quite beautiful.
Richardson: It’s maybe the most spectacular botanical garden in the world. It’s not really a botanical garden in a normal sense but more like a mountainside. You can’t do it all in one day — you do bits and then come back another day and do other bits. It’s really quite wild.
The Miller House, situated in the small city of Columbus, about 50 miles from Indianapolis, is the product of two cosmopolitan Midwesterners: the architect Eero Saarinen and the industrialist J. Irwin Miller, who, with his wife, Xenia, commissioned the approximately 7,000-square-foot, flat-roof glass-and-stone structure as a family home in 1953. It was Saarinen who hired Dan Kiley, a regular collaborator of his, to design the 13.5-acre grounds, which back up to the Flat Rock River. Kiley’s signature was pairing Modernist architecture with the formality of 17th-century French gardens, as exemplified by the South Garden at the Art Institute of Chicago, on which he also worked with Saarinen. At Miller House, he lined the entrance drive with a double row of horse chestnut trees (since replaced by yellow buckeyes) and added another allée, of honey locusts, along the west side of the house to frame the river view. Magnolia trees by the entrance add curves to the symmetry, while large, free-flowing weeping beech trees shield the house from wind and sun. The sense of control is mixed with exuberance: By the terrace, the emerald green lawn meets platforms of liriope and a checkerboard with pink and red impatiens under a canopy of crab apple trees, all of which evokes the decorator Alexander Girard’s vibrantly patterned interiors. While the legacy of this kind of water-intensive, high-maintenance landscape is ecologically fraught, the garden stands as a remarkable icon of its time. Today, fittingly, it’s owned and operated by the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields. — K.W.
Needleman: This is Dan Kiley’s masterpiece — the perfect marriage of classical gardening with Modernism. The house, while it’s this glass structure, recalls a Palladian villa and the garden does a similar thing: It incorporates classical elements — hedging, allées, groves — but none of them are as you would expect. I think it’s the most important American Modernist garden.
Mori: It has this incredible sense of calm and very generous proportions. I think that’s something about Kiley’s work that’s difficult to perceive in a photograph — the slower pace at which you move through it makes you feel like you’re in a different world.
Neither fences nor hedges mark the borders of the filmmaker and artist Derek Jarman’s former home in Dungeness. Instead, the small wooden fisherman’s cottage and its garden — which he bought in 1986 and lived in until his death in 1994 — sit directly on the rocky beach of this desolate English headland, which is dominated by views of a nuclear power plant. In front of the house, which is painted pitch-black with acid yellow trim, plants are arranged into flower beds, a riff on suburban landscaping that feels surreal in this hardscrabble setting. Jarman first attempted to use traditional blooms like roses, but quickly realized that only the toughest annuals and perennials would survive such unbuffered exposure to salt, wind and sun. Ultimately, he planted a trippy rainbow of valerian, viper’s bugloss, foxglove, sea campion, wild peas, teasels, sea kale and sea holly, along with the gorse that flourishes along the English coastline. When in full flower, swaths of red and yellow poppies add to the Technicolor palette. Scattered with found objects, the garden doubles as an art installation: There are pieces of stone and flint arranged in circles, rusted metal fragments standing in for statuary and huge chains displayed like artifacts. Jarman gathered all of them himself, mining the detritus of the semi-industrial landscape. He left the cottage to his longtime companion, Keith Collins, and after Collins’s death in 2018, the British charity Art Fund, along with Jarman’s friends, raised funds to preserve it. Today it’s maintained by the local nonprofit Creative Folkestone. — C.C.
Needleman: Jarman knew he was dying when he was making this garden, and that feels poetic to me. Often gardens are enclosed and we’re trying to create a fantasy and an idealized place, but this opens onto the power plant. To me, it just looks very beautiful.
Sargeant: I was there last weekend, actually, and it’s amazing. That whole area is a nature preserve and the sea is just a few hundred meters away. A good thing to do is visit Great Dixter, Sissinghurst and this one at the same time because the three together make a wonderfully contrasting tour of gardens in the same area.
Richardson: I didn’t want to go after Jarman died, partly because I don’t think Collins, who was still living there, liked visitors coming and he didn’t really maintain it in the same way. Now the garden is very strongly protected and has its own head gardener, [Jonny Bruce], who’s really good.
Considered the father of modern tropical garden design, Roberto Burle Marx completed more than 2,000 landscapes between the 1930s and the ’90s in his native Brazil and beyond. But his former home, on the outskirts of Rio, is the place to experience the full force of his vision. On the grounds of a 100-acre hillside, Burle Marx — an early proponent of designing with native plants — nurtured and studied more than 3,500 specimens from Central and South America, some of which he’d discovered on expeditions into the jungle. “Burle Marx considered the property a ‘landscape laboratory,’ often relating it to an alchemist’s crucible,” says Claudia Storino, director of what’s today a house-and-garden museum. To better understand the tropical and subtropical plants’ growth habits and design potential, the landscape architect assembled them in various ways throughout the property. Pieces of reclaimed granite form ancient-looking backdrops for bromeliads, giant agave emerge from a sea of snake plants and masses of pygmy screw pine fringe the banks of a pond. As Burle Marx once said: “The plant is, to a landscape artist, not only a plant … but it is also a color, a shape, a volume or an arabesque in itself.” — Miranda Cooper
Mori: Marx’s gardens aren’t like European gardens: The shapes here are organic, and he incorporates the idea of rainforest conservation.
Benech: I love the color palette of the pergola of the small house in which he lived: white and pale green that mirrors the climbing jade vines exactly, like a painting. It’s an example of how keen he was with color. I think he’s the most important designer of the 20th century.
Built by members of the imperial family in the 17th century, this one seduces visitors not with a single sweeping vista, but, rather, with a series of impeccably crafted scenes. The 17-acre landscape features a large, irregularly shaped pond, with hills and valleys built along a pathway to obscure and reveal various views — a signature of so-called Japanese stroll gardens, which proliferated during the Edo period. At one point, a peninsula of flat rocks jutting into the pond appears, complete with a stone lantern standing in for a lighthouse — a recreation of a famous viewpoint over Japan’s Amanohashidate sandbar. Elsewhere, visitors encounter evergreen trees and shrubs planted alone or in small, intentional vignettes. Integrated seamlessly into the landscape are rustic teahouses with viewing platforms, the most beloved of which is a wooden structure positioned to admire the harvest moon and its reflection in the pond. Even the ground itself is carefully calibrated to control the way the garden is experienced: Small stones form tight jigsaw patterns along some pathways for a smooth journey; in other areas, steps are spaced farther apart, encouraging visitors to slow down and appreciate a mossy bridge, say, or the silhouette of a lone pine tree. — M.C.
Mori: It’s different from most Japanese gardens in that it’s completely scripted. You walk from one place to another and take in very specific viewpoints. It’s a stroll garden (or kaiyu-shiki) and also a hide-and-seek garden (miegakure), where you see various elements appearing and disappearing. It’s maintained by the imperial household and it’s difficult to visit: My advice is to make an appointment online as early as possible.
Sargeant: When you visit, how can you get insight into those things? The hide-and-seek, the reading of the garden … is that explained in some way?
Benech: I think you’re required to have a guided tour.
Richardson: But isn’t the most famous Japanese garden neither this one nor the moss garden [see No. 5] but Ryoanji [the Kyoto rock garden and Zen temple, built in the 15th century]?
Mori: Ryoanji is famous, but it doesn’t have the complexity of the Imperial Palace or the spiritual quality of the moss garden.
The city of Suzhou, some 70 miles west of Shanghai, is often billed as the Venice of the East for its network of picturesque canals. Even better, however, are its historic gardens, which span over a thousand years of history and number more than 50, nine of which, dating from the 11th to the 19th centuries, are UNESCO World Heritage sites. Each is considered a masterpiece of classical Chinese garden design, with the aim of evoking vast natural landscapes on a small scale through the use of water, architecture, rocks and plants. The largest, and perhaps the best known, is the 13-acre Humble Administrator’s Garden, created in the 16th century by the government official Wang Xianchen. One of the most ornate in the city, it contains numerous pavilions, pools and interconnecting islands. The Master of the Nets Garden — originally laid out in the 12th century by Shi Zhengzhi, a retired bureaucrat who was inspired by the solitary life of a Chinese fisherman — is much smaller, only about one and a half acres, and is centered on a large reflecting pond, known as the Rosy Cloud Pool. There, pavilions are built on rocks or piers right over the water’s edge, with larger buildings set farther back and partially obscured by trees, making the boundaries of the garden unclear. This clever use of proportion, scale and framing make the garden a quintessential example of the classical Chinese style, as do its magnolias, peonies and lacebark pines, each of which holds cultural and seasonal significance. — C.F.
Sargeant: Here in the West, we’re taught that Japanese gardens evolved from the Chinese style, but I’ve learned that it was actually much more of a back-and-forth between the two styles.
Mori: These gardens were built over nearly a thousand years, so they have many different representations of Chinese garden design motifs: pagodas, buildings, landscape elements. Each of the gardens is a place of philosophy and thinking.
Sargeant: In the English style, we connect with the landscape by borrowing the view, building a garden to highlight it. Here, they’re telling the story of a landscape by recreating it within the gardens themselves, in miniaturized form.
In the 18th century, country estates all over England were being torn up as the formal French style that had long dominated garden design gave way to a fashion for more natural-looking, so-called Arcadian landscapes. The architect and designer William Kent was the trend’s leading proponent, and also the person that Sir James Dormer, a British Army officer, had hired to rethink the gardens at his family’s 25-acre Oxfordshire estate, Rousham. Today, Dormer’s descendants remain in residence there and Kent’s garden has, remarkably, lasted in its entirety, one of the era’s few survivors. Visitors can follow the meandering, 300-year-old paths that he laid out through shady vales and over sloping lawns and take in views of the River Cherwell from his seven-arched stone loggia, modeled after the forecourt of the temple of Fortuna Primigenia at Palestrina, near Rome. To accentuate Rousham’s classical mood, Kent installed a faux ruin, nicknamed “The Eyecatcher,” on a distant hill, as well as statuary of mythical figures throughout: Venus overlooks a lake while Antinous, a young lover of the Emperor Hadrian, guards the woodland. On the northeast side of the circa 1635 house, the walled garden is even older, predating Kent’s design. There, deep borders are filled with colorful blooms; peach, apricot, pear and plum trees are trained against 17th-century brick garden walls and a boxwood parterre is filled with picture-perfect English roses. — C.C.
Richardson: Rousham is still in the hands of the family that commissioned it back in the early 18th century and it’s a great favorite of landscape architects and garden designers. It’s Kent’s masterpiece, which he did after designing other places like Chiswick House and Stowe, where he was learning his trade. Here, he’s unleashed.
Needleman: It’s completely man-made but it taps into our idea of a perfect countryside — a garden leaping the fence. It’s a beautiful, sensual kind of landscape.
Sargeant: And it’s got a wonderful ha-ha.
Delavan: What’s a ha-ha?
Needleman: It’s a kind of running ditch so you can have the cattle and sheep grazing, and they look like they’re on your lawn but they actually can’t get to the house. It’s this idea of bringing the landscape, unimpeded by a fence, straight up to the door.
Sargeant: It’s called that because it takes you by surprise. You’re strolling in the garden and you come across it and you say, “Aha!”
In 1966, the Scottish poet and artist Ian Hamilton Finlay moved with his wife, Sue, to an isolated farmstead called Stonypath, an hour outside Edinburgh, in the Pentland Hills. With little money or knowledge of garden design, they set about making what would become Finlay’s most enduring creative work. The seven-acre garden was originally intended as a place to display Finlay’s art: poetry, aphorisms, puns and metaphors carved into stone and wood. His plaques, headstones, sculptures and obelisks — created with a team of craftspeople — explore themes including classical mythology, French revolutionary philosophy, pastoral romanticism and modern warfare. Installed around the garden (in the clearing of a glade, on a bridge over a stream, as plinths in a pond), they’re laced with wit and unpredictability: A visitor might be lulled by the peaceful setting, its wide views over wildflower-strewn moorland, only to be jolted by the pair of giant stone hand grenades with metal pins perching on the formal gateposts. Finlay named the garden Little Sparta in the late 1970s, partly as a nod to Edinburgh’s reputation as “the Athens of the North” (a reference to its many neoclassical buildings and academic leanings) but also in homage to the militaristic, ancient city-state; he had his own fierce battles with the local council. Almost two decades after his death, the wholly unique landscape continues to resonate in the manner detailed in “Unconnected Sentences on Gardening,” his 1980 poem. “Certain gardens are described as retreats,” he wrote, “when they are really attacks.” — K.W.
Richardson: People think of it as an agglomeration of about 150 individual pieces but it was never conceived in that way. It’s a total entity. He was mixing the idealism of humankind with its malevolence and violence, so you have things like classical pillars topped with hand grenades and a tortoise sculpture with “panzer leader” [“panzer” is German for “tank”] written on its side. There are a lot of references to the French Revolution because he was obsessed with its mix of idealism and horrifying cruelty, the contradiction in human life. Some say it’s the most important work of art made in Scotland in the second half of the 20th century.
Sargeant: I’ll second that. And you can still visit it, Tim?
Richardson: It’s open and in good shape.
Between 1889 and 1932, the architect Edwin Lutyens and the garden designer Gertrude Jekyll collaborated on about 100 projects, most of them in their native England. Le Bois des Moutiers, perched on cliffs overlooking the English Channel, is the only one in France, commissioned by the banking heir Guillaume Mallet at the end of the 19th century. The five-acre garden features landscaped parkland as well as a series of discrete spaces nearer the house that correspond to different rooms in the property’s Arts & Crafts-style manor house and mirror its features. In the White Garden, for instance, stone benches are set into a hedge to reflect the layout of two closets flanking a large window in the music room. Le Bois des Moutiers also claims the distinction of being the first garden in France to adopt mixed borders, the wide, cottage-style flower beds planted with colorful blooms like roses, lavender and delphiniums that were a signature of Jekyll’s style. The estate was acquired in 2020 by the French film producer Jérôme Seydoux and his wife Sophie, who commissioned the American garden designer Madison Cox to oversee a much-needed restoration. In addition to revitalizing and replanting the original garden rooms, Cox is removing overgrown vegetation to improve the water views and adding contemporary elements including a large, reflecting water feature and a labyrinth of espaliered fruit trees and yews. — C.F.
Delavan: What I love about this one is that the interior and garden design are interwoven. That’s a sophisticated concept, and it was conceived in the 19th century.
Benech: And it’s aging well! I’ve known this place for the past 50 years. It’s special to still find trees there, like the rhododendrons and yews, that were there initially, because it’s been redone and redone and redone over the past hundred years.
Needleman: It’s a Gertrude Jekyll-Edwin Lutyens mega collaboration — the first English-style flower garden in France. And Madison Cox is sensitive and original when dealing with historic gardens and bringing them into the present moment, as he did at the Villa Oasis/Majorelle Gardens for Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé. He’s the perfect choice to update it.
The Russian Prince Peter Wolkonsky fell in love with plants as a child, sneaking into the kitchen plot of his next door neighbor, Czar Nicholas II. In 1965, after traveling the world painting landscapes and botanicals, he purchased a former orchard set on hills overlooking the Jaudy River in Brittany and started planting a garden. The 42 acres are now divided into seven distinct designs that range in style from a wild moor covered in golden grasses to a manicured expanse of geometric hedges. Harnessing the many streams running through the property, he built reflecting pools, ponds, waterfalls and an Italianate grotto decorated with shells. Over the next three decades, Wolkonsky amassed a vast collection of rhododendrons, azaleas, camellias and dogwoods; upon his death in 1997, he left the land to his daughter, the horticulturist Isabelle Vaughan. In 2021, she sold Kerdalo to its current steward: the accessories designer Christian Louboutin. Early in his career, feeling burned out on fashion, he’d dabbled in landscape design, “but working with nature required too much time and patience for the young, impatient man I was at that age,” Louboutin says. “So I went back to shoe design.” An admirer of Kerdalo since first catching a glimpse of it more than 30 years ago, he’s been updating leaky water systems and ripping out diseased boxwoods, which will be replaced next year with an installation by the Italian artist Giuseppe Ducrot, inspired by Wolkonsky’s hedges. “The garden doesn’t belong to me,” says Louboutin, whose goal is to preserve as much of the prince’s original design as possible while also protecting Kerdalo from the effects of climate change. “I belong to the garden.” — J.S.
Benech: I hadn’t been there for more than 30 years, but I took Christian Louboutin to help connect him with Isabelle when she was selling the place. I was amazed by how big Peter’s newer plantings were — they had been my height [about six feet] when I was last there. And it’s extremely well planted with both ordinary and extremely rare things, so visitors can enjoy it whether they know about plants or not. There are some very special magnolias there.
Alexa Brazilian: Can we visit or do you have to make friends with the owner?
Benech: It’s totally open to visitors, which was part of the deal when Christian bought it.
Located in a hillside village about a 15-minute drive northeast from Florence, the gardens of Villa Gamberaia, with not quite four acres under cultivation, are “probably the most perfect example of the art of producing a great effect on a small scale,” wrote Edith Wharton in her 1904 book, “Italian Villas and Their Gardens.” Composed mostly of cypress, boxwood, yew, oak, lemon and olive trees — with a few mixed borders of lavender, irises and roses — the space is arranged as a long, grassy bowling green opening onto a series of small garden rooms. The layout has remained largely the same since the early 17th century, when it was planned by Zanobi Lapi, a Florentine merchant, along with his two nephews. Gamberaia’s style is hard to define — “No matter how carefully one measures the spaces, analyzes the plan or seeks to interpret it in terms of Renaissance, Mannerist, or Baroque … there is always something elusive,” says the historian Patricia Osmond, who curates the villa’s archive — although it has nonetheless been emulated widely: Miami’s Villa Vizcaya and Delaware’s Longwood Gardens, both built in the first half of the 20th century, pay homage. Now run by a private trust, Villa Gamberaia was recently given close to two million euros (about $2.3 million) for upgrades by the European Union and the Italian government, making it one of the few private estates in Italy ever to receive such a grant. A portion of that money has gone toward upgrading the water systems, in an effort to protect the shady, centuries-old refuge from climate change. — J.S.
Needleman: It’s the most magical garden. It’s not a very auspicious site — it’s super narrow — but the use of space is fantastic.
Richardson: I agree. In fact, Villa Gamberaia is my favorite garden in the world.
Benech: It’s a divine place on a perfectly human scale.
Of all the formal gardens in Europe, none showcase topiary quite as exuberantly — some might say obsessively — as Marqueyssac. On this hilltop property overlooking the Dordogne Valley, more than 150,000 boxwoods are hand-clipped into a variety of fanciful silhouettes: Swirls, buns and swooping hedges form pathways; brick-shaped shrubs seem to spill like Legos down a slope; leafy lollipops appear at random. The garden began as the vision of the property’s onetime owner, Julien de Cerval, who, after inheriting it from his family in the 1860s, was inspired by trips to Italy to plant and shape boxwoods by the thousands. After his death in the l893, the landscape languished until the 1990s, when the new owner, Kléber Rossillon, a former engineer whose company maintains a dozen cultural heritage sites throughout France, revived many of the original shrubs, filled in holes and — lacking de Cerval’s original design plans — clipped the shrubs into shapes of his own imagining. While topiary remains the star attraction, Rossillon has added other surprises to the 54-acre garden, including several waterfalls, quirky contemporary sculptures and an allosaurus dinosaur skeleton. To fully appreciate the whole endeavor, visitors can follow pathways leading to various viewpoints, including one that overlooks hundreds of boxwood mounds in shapes that mimic the rolling hills of the landscape beyond. — M.C.
Delavan: It’s minimalist in its limited plant selection and color palette but still manages to feel romantic. In the 19th century, the owner planted thousands of boxwoods — a lot of these gardens were made by people who were kind of obsessive. I think there are 150,000 boxwoods now and they’re trimmed super tightly but rounded. It looks almost like flocks of sheep.
Richardson: It’s an example of a topiary garden on a grand scale that somehow retains the charm and character of a private residence. It’s not overwhelmed by whimsy.
Reeling from a failed bid for the papacy, yet awarded the governorship in Tivoli as a consolation, Cardinal Ippolito II d’Este wanted to build an extravagant estate that would secure his legacy. The resulting 16th-century gardens, conceived of by the architect Pirro Ligorio, not only achieved Cardinal d’Este’s goal, but went on to influence the design of landscapes throughout Europe. Water features have always been the highlight at Villa d’Este’s garden, which has been built upon by successive owners. Today, there are 51 fountains and nymphaea, 398 spouts and 64 waterfalls or cascades across its seven terraced acres, with water streaming down stairs, pouring into long, decorative canals and springing up around classical sculptures. It’s even been inventively manipulated to power machines that produce the sounds of birds or organ music in some fountains. Now preserved as a UNESCO World Heritage site, Villa d’Este remains such a spectacle today that one nobleman’s quote from 1569 still resonates: “Wherever you look, springs gush forth in such a variety of ways and with such splendor of design that everywhere else on earth of this kind is far inferior.” — M.C.
Needleman: Some of our other Italian gardens are very classical Renaissance and this must be Baroque. It’s a little over-the-top.
Mori: Very different. It’s a water garden with scores of fountains all running on just gravity — a masterpiece of hydraulic engineering. Science and natural beauty are integrated. And the sound is exquisite! My landscape professor in architecture school had an amazing lecture all about the acoustical experience of the fountains there.
Elaborate fountains and parterres may be hallmarks of Italy’s Renaissance-era landscapes, but at the 16th-century garden Sacro Bosco, about 40 miles northwest of Rome, the most well-known feature is less romantic: a giant, gaping stone mouth with stubby fangs and an inscription below them reading “Ogni pensiero vola” (“Every thought flies”). The Mouth of Hell, as it’s known, is one of about 40 stone monsters and structures carved on-site under the direction of the architect Pirro Ligorio and the property’s 16th-century owner, Pier Francesco Orsini. The intention behind the sculptures — which range from a three-headed hound of Hades to a curiously tilted house — is a mystery. Some believe the garden’s gothic leanings reflect Orsini’s grief after the death of his wife; others contend that he was simply a well-read eccentric looking to impress guests with his references to Greek mythology and literature. While the garden lay abandoned after his death in 1585, it was rediscovered by writers and artists in the 1930s and ’40s (most notably Salvador Dalí) and purchased in 1954 by the entrepreneur Giovanni Bettini, who saw its potential as a tourist attraction. Under the stewardship of his children and grandchildren today, Sacro Bosco’s seven wooded acres are open to the public, with labyrinthine paths that encourage visitors to get lost in its eerie beauty. — M.C.
Sargeant: This is really a sculpture garden, but I don’t think that should exclude it, or any other garden that is defined as that, from our list. Obviously a garden is about plants, but it’s also about creating atmospheric spaces outside for people to enjoy — somewhere to sit and have a conversation or maybe, like in the ancient Greek tradition, to just think. It’s the same thing with Japanese gardens, where they feature rocks. Of course, plants are important in creating those spaces, but plants don’t have to be preponderant.
Richardson: And it’s wonderful for children. I took my boys there when they were 10 and 12. I mean, look at that mouth! And no one really understands what the symbolism is. It’s a mystery.
Although he died at the turn of the 18th century, André le Nôtre remains France’s most celebrated landscape designer. And while he’s best known for masterminding the grounds of Versailles, many believe that the garden at Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte, begun 20 years earlier than Versailles, was actually his finest work. Widely considered a masterpiece of formal Baroque design, the garden is laid out around a 17th-century limestone château in the jardins à la Francais style, which was dedicated to imposing symmetry on nature. Spanning more than 80 acres of former woodland, the project stretches out along a nearly two-mile-long central axis lined with matching rows of pools, fountains and parterres. Owing to the prevalence of boxwood disease, the original parterre de broderie, with its ornate swirls of hedging inspired by 17th-century embroidery patterns, was replaced in 2019 with a contemporary artwork, “Rubans Éphémères” (“Ephemeral Ribbons”) by the French artist Patrick Hourcade, which mimics the intertwining lines of Le Nôtre’s design using flat sheets of aluminum. The best time to visit Vaux-le-Vicomte is on Saturdays at sunset between late May and the end of September, when the park’s 20 fountains, controlled by the original 17th-century hydraulic system, are turned on, treating onlookers to a dramatic water show. — C.F.
Mori: There’s a lot of work with perspective in the design. It has distortions: You think a body of water is oval, but as you get closer you realize it’s circular. As an architect, I think the way they constructed the total experience is brilliant.
Benech: Approaching from the terrace of the house, you have the feeling that the garden is going up while you’re actually going down.
Mori: You can’t photograph it well because it’s all about illusion. The cameras can’t capture it. And that’s the reason to go visit.
Richardson: It’s better than Versailles, isn’t it?
Mori: Yes, I think so. It’s a precedent for Versailles.
Set between cedar trees on a hill next to Turin, Vigna Barolo was built in the 18th century and was owned for a time by the Marquess and Marchioness of Barolo, who used it as a summer house. (The celebrated writer Silvio Pellico was their onetime secretary and librarian there.) After the death of the marchioness, it served for a time as an orphanage before falling into disrepair. In 1948, when Umberta Nasi Ajmone-Marsan purchased the place, the gardens were neglected and the front lawn ended in an abrupt 20-foot drop. Ajmone-Marson, a granddaughter of Fiat founder Giovanni Agnelli, enlisted the services of the British landscape architect Russell Page, who was making a garden for her cousin Gianni and his wife, Marella Agnelli. Page’s preference for classical formality over the more cottagey leanings of his homeland were perfectly suited to the brief for this site — that the formal part of the garden should be enjoyed as a view from the house. Sketching ideas over two years, Page settled on a cruciform layout: A vertical axis of clipped evergreens leads the eye through a double parterre, past a reflecting pool and toward a labyrinth of low hedging. The square pool at the garden’s axis is flanked by a simple pool on either side, executed with characteristic understatement. To address the steep gradient from the front lawn, Page designed a double stone staircase that’s hardly visible when seen from above. The overall result is a view of the garden from the villa that is, as intended, sublime. — K.W.
Needleman: It’s a great example of Russell Page’s work.
Mori: Yes, it’s wonderful.
Delavan: I love the compactness of this design, and how meticulous all the details are.
Brazilian: It reminds me so much of his garden at the Frick Collection in New York, which Page also designed [in 1977]. It’s so pleasingly symmetrical, with a similar reflecting pool at its center.
Benech: But the garden has changed a lot since Page did it. There are no more santolinas, and the conifers he planted to hide some of the lower buildings are blocking the view now. But the garden is wonderful.
Created in the 1960s by the wealthy British expat, art patron and eccentric Edward James (whom Dalí reportedly called “crazier than all the Surrealists put together”), this otherworldly sculpture garden features 34 follies across 22 acres of rainforest in central Mexico. Here, archways are arranged at chaotic angles among enormous concrete mushrooms, snakes and orchids, while elaborate, nonsensical structures composed of neo-Classical columns and stairways lead to nowhere and have names like “The House of Three Stories That Could Be Five” or “The House With a Roof Like a Whale.” The landscape is just as attention-grabbing, with both native and cultivated plants like orchids, giant ferns and rosewood trees engulfing the sculptures, near which natural waterfalls flow and pool, reflecting strange silhouettes. After James’s death in 1984, his once-private garden was managed first by the family of a longtime friend and then, starting in 2007, by an environmental conservation foundation, which restored its structures and opened it to the public. Today, with minimal signage and visitors only permitted as part of a guided tour, exploring the landscape still feels like stepping into a dream — or, as James called it, a “Surrealist Xanadu.” — M.C.
Sargeant: I love gardens like this, with sculpture and with interesting buildings — that interplay between the built environment and landscape is fascinating and beautiful. Because of the climate, a lot of the plants look as though they’re taking over the sculptural pieces, which gives the garden a very intertwined look.
Needleman: He used the mood that a tropical junglelike garden can create in harmony with his surrealist sculptures. The two elements are working hand-in-hand to create something mysterious and magical.
Richardson: I agree with what everyone has said but … it was built as a ruin — and ruins are notorious for falling down.
Benech: Still, I’d like to go one day.
Sargeant: Take your hard hat, Louis!
At top: © Carol Casselden; Jérôme Galland; Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria; © Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte; Frédéric Soltan/Corbis via Getty Images; Howard Sooley
