Southern England Is a Paradise for Gardening Aficionados

Purple Haze. Violet levitation. Drifts of sky. Standing in my first bluebell wooden, I struggled to search out phrases for what I used to be seeing. By itself, the English bluebell is a fetching little flower, a periwinkle-colored petticoat nodding from a stem just a few inches excessive. However by the a whole lot, the 1000’s, the bluebells have been creating what felt like an optical phantasm, a carpet of shade that hovered above the forest flooring. Others, I discovered later, had discovered phrases higher than mine. A.E. Housman wrote:

Like a skylit water stood

The bluebells within the azured wooden

“Falls of sky-colour,” Gerard Manley Hopkins known as them. “Smoke-blue as an autumn bonfire” was Vita Sackville-West’s apt description. 

In English woodlands, bluebells flower early in spring, as mild seeps by way of newly leafing bushes. I’d come to the nation’s southeast in April and was fortunate sufficient to see them; inside just a few weeks they’d be gone. The bluebell woods created a sort of path for me to comply with, whether or not in gardens I visited or as surprises alongside roadsides. Their magnificence and delicate scent stopped my breath every time. 

And but the tradeoff for attending to see the bluebells was being too early for the roses, peonies, foxgloves, and summer season wildflowers. A backyard isn’t the identical from morning to nighttime, not to mention from one season to the following, which suggests you might be all the time lacking one thing. My journey was solely half achieved once I vowed to return in early June to see them of their full effulgence, or in fall once they’re blowsy and sun-drunk. 

I can’t say precisely when my love for gardens started: all I do know is that all of a sudden I used to be digging up my tiny yard in Brooklyn and placing cash I’d as soon as have spent on garments towards crops. My fascination prolonged to gardeners, who voluntarily labored to create one thing with no hope of permanence. I learn their writings and visited native botanical gardens once I may, however most of the locations I drooled over have been in England. This made sense: the aristocracy there had massive estates, in addition to massive fortunes to spend on landscaping, and creating and visiting gardens turned a beloved leisure exercise for the broader inhabitants, too. Whether or not in grand proportions or on the tiny scale of a cottage plot, it was the English fashion I liked: the looseness, the surprising mixture of crops, the poetry. 

Eager to see some in individual, I contacted Rachel Shoemaker, a Pennsylvania-based journey advisor who adores English gardens. She suggested me to concentrate on the southeast of the nation, particularly the counties of Sussex and Kent, the latter of which is called the Backyard of England. She offered a listing of shut to twenty areas—greater than I may see in a single journey. Amazingly, all of them have been concentrated in an space not a lot greater than Delaware, and inside straightforward attain of London. I deliberate a weeklong tour, with my husband becoming a member of me for the second half. 

Earlier than farms and estates claimed the land, this space was lined by forest, or weald in Previous English. As a result of the south of England noticed minimal industrialization, elements of it could possibly really feel outdoors the movement of time. Embedded in an undulating panorama of stone partitions and fields (many lined, once I was there, with electric-yellow rapeseed) are medieval cities and picturesque villages. Driving alongside winding nation roads—two lanes, generally even one—I felt barely misplaced and pleasantly off-balance, even when my instructions have been clear. 

I started to see the hyperlinks amongst gardens, and the lineage of the gardeners who had formed them—and each other. I traced threads of affect that reached even to my very own newbie cultivation. And I contemplated the questions gardens elevate: What’s a backyard, and what makes one? The place does the border between artwork and nature lie? How can we take into consideration the often-hidden histories embedded in them? And what ought to occur to a backyard as soon as its creator is gone? 

I started my journey at Gravetye Manor, in West Sussex, about an hour’s drive from Heathrow Airport. It appeared a becoming place to start out, being each a chic country-house lodge and an necessary piece of gardening historical past. For 50 years, till 1935, Gravetye was the house of William Robinson, considered one of England’s most influential backyard writers. Inbuilt 1598, Gravetye, with its thick stone partitions and gabled roofs, was the place Robinson, who additionally purchased the encircling 1,000 acres, put his concepts into apply. The world round it additionally incorporates a constellation of visit-worthy gardens, many created by rich Victorians. 

I’d by no means heard of Robinson earlier than this journey, however by week’s finish I noticed his affect in every single place. His genius was to reject the formal beds of subtropical flowers that Victorians favored for what he known as the “wild backyard.” He inspired the naturalizing of crops—which suggests they propagate themselves, with out human effort, to develop into half of the panorama—and the extension of the backyard to woodlands, roadsides, and hedgerows. His notion of “wildness” nonetheless informs how we consider the English backyard. Into his nineties, Robinson was scattering bulbs from his wheelchair. 

Gravetye’s grounds, which embody terraces, meadows, woods, and a pond, are beautiful, as are its interiors. The floral theme performs out in covetable textiles and wallpapers, and within the ornate flowers Robinson carved on the ceilings of what are actually the bar and sitting rooms. The window of my room seemed out on a hillside thickly planted with heather, tulips, oxeye daisies, spurge, and rhododendron. Within the eating room, a wall of home windows additionally gave onto the gardens. I sipped a glass of Bacchus from Kingscote Winery down the highway and watched brooding grays and pinks mottle the sky. Solely the beautiful meals—all of it impressed by produce from the ellipse-shaped kitchen backyard Robinson designed—distracted me from the view. 

Fortunately I may stroll off my meals on backyard paths. A 20-minute drive introduced me to each Nymans, a Nationwide Belief property, and, across the nook, Excessive Beeches, which Tom Coward, the pinnacle gardener at Gravetye, known as “an ideal plantsman’s paradise.” Ponds, streams, small ravines, and valleys present drama all through its 27 acres. About 20 minutes farther west, I turned in at Knepp, a 3,500-acre property the place, as a part of a rewilding experiment, native Exmoor ponies and even beavers have been reintroduced to what had been unprofitable agricultural land. I’d come to see the property’s walled backyard, which was created in 2021 on a former croquet garden. Some 1,000 species have been planted on its 1.3 acres, all designed to assist pollinators and different wildlife. Its substrate is generally crushed constructing particles, with crops chosen for his or her capability to outlive in harsh circumstances with minimal water. It’s a reminder that the gardens of the long run don’t have to seem like the previous; certainly, given the altering local weather, they might not have the ability to.

If Knepp represented one sort of botanical laboratory, I discovered one other at Wakehurst, a rustic property that the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (the well-known plant assortment simply west of London) has leased for the previous 60 years. Its Millennium Seed Financial institution shops the seeds of greater than 40,000 wild plant species. Wakehurst’s hilly topography additionally made for an exquisite stroll, on which I handed from birches in bluebells to big sequoias to a dell massed with irises. 

The subsequent day I drove east into Kent, stopping alongside the way in which at Riverhill Himalayan Gardens, which has been owned by the Rogers household since 1840. A 2010 episode of Nation Home Rescue (may there be a extra British present?) discovered the household struggling to maintain the place up. They’ve since absolutely opened the gardens to the general public, and immediately Riverhill is flourishing. Its points of interest embody a mossy, cool grotto of ferns in addition to huge views of Ashdown Forest and distant cities. Its awe-inspiring array of rhododendrons and their shut family members, azaleas, have been collected within the Himalayas by Victorian plant hunters. The gargantuan Loderi King George rhododendron stood 4 or 5 occasions my peak, shaggy with big effusive blooms of the palest pink. I struggled to attach its magnetic unruliness and divine scent to its tame cousins in America. 

These crops are a dwelling reminder that England’s backyard historical past is inextricable from its historical past as an empire. This doesn’t simply apply to the colonial plant hunters. As Olivia Laing writes in The Backyard In opposition to Time: In Search of a Frequent Paradise, her memoir of creating and excited about gardens: “Slavery additionally offered the capital for a concerted beautification of the panorama, because the grotesque income from sugar plantations have been used to fund lavish homes and gardens again in England.” I puzzled if this imperial legacy had prevented the gardens from being seen as a standard heritage. England—London particularly—is vibrantly multicultural, however I didn’t encounter a lot of that variety on the backyard paths. 

I made my option to the Pig–at Bridge Place, an outpost of the English lodge model that has introduced a youthful vitality to historic properties. This Pig, which is within the countryside simply outdoors Canterbury, inhabits the remaining wing of a Seventeenth-century nation manor, the majority of which was torn down in 1704. Surrounded by a inexperienced expanse, the constructing’s lengthy historical past features a stint as a rock-and-roll membership the place Led Zeppelin and the Kinks performed. My night time was extra sedate: I fell right into a dreamless sleep in a room with double-height ceilings, a rolltop bathtub by the home windows, and portraits of somebody’s ancestors on the partitions. 

The subsequent morning I joined a tour of the lodge’s spectacular kitchen backyard and farm, which incorporates the whole lot from a mushroom home to hops to, sure, pigs. I then drove about 15 minutes to Goodnestone Park. Jane Austen turned a frequent customer to the property when her brother married into the FitzWalter household, the house owners because the early 1700s. She could have been impressed to write down Pleasure and Prejudice after a dance at Goodnestone, and the tower of the Twelfth-century church the place she worshiped rises over three related walled gardens. Pollinator-friendly crops, which mirror an effort to make the backyard ecologically sound in addition to pleasing, have been built-in with the standard roses and wisteria. I felt like I used to be trying on the previous and future at the identical time. 

Within the afternoon I collected my husband at a prepare station in Canterbury (too late within the day to go to the 1,400-year-old cathedral, alas). We drove north for dinner at the Sportsman, a Michelin-starred restaurant set on the Thames Estuary, and feasted on poached oysters. The subsequent morning we set out for Sissinghurst Fortress Backyard. (It’s not truly a fort: the title is ironic, bestowed when it housed French prisoners of warfare.) It’s amongst England’s most well-known gardens, on account of each the originality of its design and the larger-than-life personalities (and unconventional marriage) of its creators. 

Harold Nicolson, a diplomat and creator, and his spouse, the author Vita Sackville-West, purchased the property in 1930. It was largely a break, with a circa-1570 tower at its middle the place Sackville-West wrote (her research remains to be intact). You may—and if ready, ought to—climb the 78 steps to the highest for an impressive view of the fields, the “weald,” and the backyard, whose construction can finest be appreciated from above. Its structure, by which yew hedges and pleasantly aged pink-brick partitions outline rooms and axial walkways, was primarily Nicolson’s work. He known as it a “succession of privacies… a sequence of escapes from the world.” He additionally laid out the Lime Stroll, a proper allée of bushes with intricate carpets of bulbs at their bases. 

Sackville-West was extra of the plantswoman. She launched near 200 cultivars of roses, as assorted in scent as in look. In a gardening column for the Observer, she described maybe her most well-known innovation, the White Backyard. Drawing on a palette of grey, inexperienced, white, and silver, it aimed for a “cool, nearly glaucous, impact” in an area enclosed by partitions and contrasting darkish hedges. White climbing roses, delphiniums, peonies, silvery thistle, and a cover of Rosa mulliganii bloom in succession by way of the months. I’d seen numerous photographs of this backyard, however none may match the enchantment of it in individual.

Nicolson as soon as wrote that his spouse, who turned extra reclusive because the years went on, wished that her workers might be thrown right into a trance, with “she and her canine and the little robin by the dining-room to be left as the one three transferring issues at Sissinghurst.” Remarkably, it’s doable to have one thing akin to that have immediately (sans canine, and with out entrancement) by reserving a keep within the Priest’s Home, a three-bedroom cottage inside the backyard grounds. 

As soon as an Elizabethan banqueting corridor, the home served as kitchen and eating room for the Nicolsons, then as sleeping quarters for his or her boys. Now administered by the Nationwide Belief, the home is self-catering, because the British say, which means you need to deliver the whole lot (together with shampoo and firewood). Your reward is with the ability to wander the backyard earlier than and after visiting hours. Alone, I watched the morning solar spill over the spurge and crimson poppies within the spare, rock-lined Delos Backyard, a 2021 addition impressed by the Nicolsons’ time in Greece. At night time we sat beneath a pergola within the White Backyard, its lilacs, tulips, and meadow rue luminous within the moonlight. 

With solely a daytime café open at Sissinghurst, we ventured one night time to Tillingham, a winery and farm hidden down a again highway. One other night time, we walked the hilly streets of Rye, the place remnants of the traditional city partitions sit alongside artwork galleries and boutiques. Returning to Sissinghurst, we heard nightingales—uncommon in England immediately—singing from the fields because the silhouetted tower pointed up towards a meadow of stars. 

A backyard like Sissinghurst can really feel so easy, so “pure,” that it’s straightforward to overlook the labor required to take care of it as a murals. Creating the “timeless phantasm of flowers spilling out of partitions,” because the Nicolsons’ grandson Adam places it, requires inserting flowers in compost plugs into the partitions every yr. As in any respect Nationwide Belief gardens, that is achieved within the title of preserving, as a lot as doable, the backyard that Sackville-West and Nicolson made (or, as within the Delos Backyard, dreamed of). But a backyard, ideally, is a dwelling embodiment of creativity. I puzzled, whereas at Sissinghurst, if there was an irresolvable stress between conservation and innovation.

“Dwelling” is strictly how I might describe Nice Dixter Home & Gardens, regardless that its creator is gone. A couple of 30-minute drive from Sissinghurst, the backyard was initially laid out by Sir Edwin Lutyens, who additionally designed the imperial capital in New Delhi, nevertheless it was the life’s work of Christopher Lloyd, who was, like William Robinson, an necessary backyard author. Lloyd died in 2006, however Fergus Garrett, who Lloyd employed as head gardener and who’s now additionally chief government, has continued Lloyd’s sense of experimentation, by which the pure and the cultivated are in fixed dialog. 

Bamboo shoulders up subsequent to roses, Anatolian tulips subsequent to woodland forget-me-nots. A fig tree is intricately espaliered on a wall within the mesmerizing Barn Backyard, round whose small pond I walked repeatedly, attempting to take the whole lot in. Meadows with excessive grasses and noticed orchids yield to an exuberant, 200-foot-long border. Full of dozens of species, starting from alliums and brassicas to Jerusalem sage, it’s, as research have proven, one of essentially the most biodiverse locations in the nation. However there’s thought (and intuition) behind each plant placement: the inexperienced gold of hare’s-ear to offer early shade, for instance, or silvery foliage to set off a hot-orange tulip. 

Making a memorable backyard, I noticed, requires not simply an understanding of crops, not simply a watch for shade, texture, form, and construction, but additionally a way of play, of shock. An awesome backyard works not simply in your eyes (and nostril), but additionally on your emotions. 

“The gardens I really like most belong to individuals who’ve achieved their very own factor,” Garrett advised me. At his suggestion, I visited Balmoral Cottage, the place I discovered one other sturdy character at work. Simply 10 minutes from Sissinghurst, the property sits down a lane within the quintessentially English village of Benenden. (Like many non-public gardens, it opens a number of occasions a yr by way of the Nationwide Backyard Scheme, which makes use of the admission charges to lift cash for charities.) For 42 years, Charlotte Molesworth, an artist, and her husband, Donald, have been making a backyard of just about dreamlike eclecticism. The garden has been mowed to create concentric ridged circles; Charlotte’s dazzling yew topiaries, formed to resemble waves, peacocks, and extra, present construction. I felt like I’d discovered the Lewis Carroll of gardeners. 

One other idiosyncratic spirit was behind Prospect Cottage, one of many final gardens my husband and I visited, and the southernmost. (We paired it with an excellent late-afternoon stroll alongside the White Cliffs of Dover, that are about 45 minutes away). The black-tarred former fishing shack is about in Dungeness, a headland that’s generally known as—inaccurately however not fully facetiously—“England’s solely desert.” The terrain feels disdainful of human enterprise, with broken-down boats reflecting its historical past as a fishing village and a sea of flint pebbles, often known as shingles, protecting the seashore. 

The queer filmmaker and author Derek Jarman purchased Prospect Cottage in 1987. “The shingles preclude a backyard,” he wrote in his first yr on the property, however by the following yr he was making one anyway. He had found what number of crops, comparable to sea kale and canine rose, develop naturally right here, and what number of extra might be coaxed to, generally by embedding soil and manure beneath the shingle. From the grey floor emerge pops of shade: scarlet and orange poppies, indigo irises, pink foxgloves, crimson wallflowers, blue echiums. 

Jarman died of AIDS in 1994. At this time the cottage is preserved as an artists’ residency. It’s neither marked nor walled—“my backyard’s boundaries are the horizon,” Jarman wrote. It appears to nearly soften into the encircling panorama, and in doing so, “intentionally obliterate the border between cultivated and wild,” as Laing noticed in The Backyard In opposition to Time. 

It takes extraordinary endurance to make a backyard, however my journey taught me that it takes endurance to understand a backyard, too. A well-done one is sort of a puzzle: the small print and bones, the work and decisions of the gardener, emerge with time. The extra I checked out Jarman’s, the extra I observed, from the bright-yellow lichen that matched the trim on the home and the circle of rusty chains subsequent to a round plant mattress to the wit in the way in which the driftwood columns framed two now-defunct nuclear reactors seen within the distance. 

Laing, who was concerned within the effort to protect Jarman’s home, concluded, after a 2019 go to, “A backyard dies with its proprietor.” This might be, but Prospect Cottage stays a pilgrimage website, not least for artwork college students, lots of whom have been consuming down the highway on the Dungeness Snack Shack, an out of doors contemporary seafood spot.

Prospect Cottage nonetheless seems like a spot of nice freedom, one which made me need to go dwelling and experiment in my very own backyard, even by making a sculpture from a department. Like the brand new backyard at Knepp, Jarman’s teaches the best way to domesticate beneath constraint. 

The actor Tilda Swinton, who was Jarman’s pal and frequent collaborator, has written that she and Jarman discovered Prospect Cottage once they have been trying to find a bluebell wooden she remembered from her childhood in Kent. The wooden had been paved over, she reviews. And but, wandering across the cottage, I noticed bluebells, in a forbidding thicket of elderberry rising beneath a utility pole that warned hazard of demise. Not the huge carpets I’d seen within the woods, however thick handfuls nonetheless. They have been like a blue thread stitching Prospect Cottage to all of its extra typical brethren—a reminder that this, too, was an English backyard.  

A model of this story first appeared within the April 2026 concern of Journey + Leisure beneath the headline “Earthly Paradise.”