Somewhere at 35,000 feet, suspended between departure and arrival, is the perfect moment to dream about where you’ll go next. We have a suggestion. Eleven of them, in fact.
Before We Take Off
You are, at this precise moment, in one of the finest vantage points from which to contemplate the world below. The patchwork of field and forest visible through the oval window — the geometry of agriculture, the dark seams of hedgerow, the silver thread of a river catching afternoon light — is, if you look at it in the right spirit, a kind of garden. Humanity’s longest-running act of landscape design, conducted at a scale that only becomes visible from altitude.
Gardens, it turns out, are everywhere. And the finest ones are worth travelling very serious distances indeed to visit.
This is not a piece about the obvious. Not a list of places you could find on any travel aggregator or have already bookmarked and forgotten. This is, instead, an invitation to organise your next journey — or the one after that, or the one you’ve been thinking about for years without quite committing — around one of the oldest and most reliably rewarding forms of human making. The great garden traditions of the world are as culturally revealing as any museum, as architecturally impressive as any monument, and considerably more fragrant than either.
We begin at the beginning. Which is to say, in the desert.
The Middle East: Where the Very Idea of a Garden Was Born
Fly into: Muscat, Marrakech, or Granada for the Nasrid gardens; Istanbul for Ottoman garden culture
The word paradise is doing a lot of work in the English language, and most people have forgotten its origins. It comes from the Old Persian pairidaeza: a walled enclosure. Specifically, the walled enclosure in which the Persian kings planted trees, introduced wildlife, and created — in deliberate, designed contrast to the arid landscape beyond the walls — a place of shade, water, fragrance, and abundance. This is where the garden, as a conscious human invention, begins. Not in the English countryside. Not in Renaissance Italy. Here, in the ancient Near East, where water was the most precious substance imaginable and to share it generously was the highest form of civilised behaviour.
The Islamic garden tradition that grew from these Persian roots is one of the most coherent and geographically expansive design philosophies ever developed. From the court gardens of the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad to the Mughal gardens of the Indian subcontinent, from the Ottoman pleasure gardens of Istanbul to the extraordinary Andalusian masterpieces of Granada, a single set of ideas — about enclosure, about water, about fragrance, about the garden as earthly image of the divine paradise described in the Quran — generated an almost infinite variety of beautiful spaces.
The Alhambra in Granada remains the most visited and most written-about expression of this tradition in the Western world, and it earns every superlative. The Patio de los Arrayanes — the Court of the Myrtles — with its long, still reflecting pool edged with clipped myrtle hedges and framing the Torre Comares in perfect symmetry, is one of those spaces that stops you physically. You come around a corner and you simply stop. The composition is so complete, so quietly authoritative, that the usual tourist impulse to move on, to see what’s next, simply doesn’t arise. You stay. You look. You begin to understand, in a way that no book had quite communicated, why this tradition placed such absolute faith in the power of still water and geometric enclosure.
The sound of water at the Alhambra is as important as its sight. Running through channels, falling over rills, murmuring in fountains throughout the palace complex, it performs the function that every Islamic garden designer understood as fundamental: cooling the air, masking the noise of the world beyond the walls, and creating — through purely physical means — a sensation of serene, enclosed abundance that is the closest earthly approximation to the paradise the gardens were designed to evoke.
When to go: Late April to early June, when the roses in the Generalife gardens are flowering and the heat has not yet reached its summer intensity. Book the Alhambra well in advance — this is non-negotiable. The early morning ticket, before the crowds, is worth setting an alarm for.
China: The Garden as Philosophical Argument
Fly into: Shanghai (one hour by high-speed rail to Suzhou); Beijing for the imperial garden tradition
China’s contribution to world garden culture is, by almost any measure, the most substantial of any single civilisation. The country is the botanical origin of a staggering proportion of the plants that fill gardens across the temperate world — rhododendrons, roses, clematis, ornamental cherries, camellias, hostas, wisterias, and hundreds more were collected from Chinese hillsides and river valleys by the botanical explorers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and introduced to gardens that had previously been far poorer for their absence. The Chinese garden tradition itself, developed over three thousand years of continuous refinement, produced in its classical scholar garden form one of the most sophisticated spatial experiences available anywhere in the designed world.
Suzhou, a city of canals and whitewashed walls an hour west of Shanghai on the high-speed rail line, is where to go. Nine of its classical gardens are UNESCO World Heritage Sites, and together they form the richest concentration of great garden design in any single city on earth. The Humble Administrator’s Garden — Zhuōzhèng Yuán, which translates more precisely as the Garden of the Unsuccessful Politician, a name of delightful self-deprecation — is the largest and arguably the finest, its central pond reflecting pavilions, covered walkways, and carefully trained trees in compositions that have been refined across five centuries. The Garden of the Master of the Nets is smaller, its spaces more compressed, its use of borrowed view and sequential revelation more intense — the experience of moving through it, each turn disclosing a new composition through a moon gate or a shaped window, is unlike anything available in Western garden design.
The fundamental design principle of the Chinese scholar garden — the creation, within a limited urban space, of a landscape that feels boundless, varied, and constantly surprising — is achieved through techniques that are as intellectually interesting as they are visually beautiful. Walls are not boundaries but compositional devices, their openings carefully positioned to frame views that make adjacent spaces seem larger and more complex than they are. Paths never run straight, always curving to delay the revelation of what lies ahead. Water, rocks, plants, and architecture are combined in ratios of such precise balance that the effect — which should feel contrived, given how controlled everything is — instead feels as natural and inevitable as a landscape encountered in the wild.
If Suzhou is the classical tradition at its most urbane, then Beijing’s imperial gardens — the Summer Palace, Beihai Park, the gardens of the Forbidden City — represent it at its most expansive and politically ambitious. The Summer Palace, with its vast Kunming Lake, its Longevity Hill crowned by the Tower of Buddhist Incense, and its seventeen-arch bridge connecting the main island to the shore, is a designed landscape of imperial scale that rewards a full day’s unhurried exploration.
When to go: April for spring blossom; October for autumn colour in the maple and ginkgo plantings. Avoid Chinese national holidays unless crowds of considerable intensity are part of your travel philosophy.
India: Heat, Colour, and the Geometry of Paradise
Fly into: Delhi for the Mughal garden tradition; Kochi for tropical southern garden culture; Srinagar (seasonal) for the Kashmir gardens
India’s garden traditions are as plural and as impossible to reduce to a single description as India itself. The subcontinent encompasses climates from the high-altitude cool of Kashmir — where chinars (Oriental plane trees) turn gold in October against a backdrop of snow-dusted peaks — to the humid, monsoon-driven lushness of Kerala, where tropical plants of extraordinary extravagance grow with an ease that would leave a northern European gardener speechless. Both extremes, and everything between, have produced distinct and remarkable garden cultures.
The Mughal garden tradition of northern India is what most international visitors come for, and it does not disappoint. The Emperor Babur, founder of the Mughal dynasty and a man of genuine aesthetic sensibility, was reportedly devastated by what he considered the drabness of the Indian landscape when he arrived from his native Central Asia in the early sixteenth century. His response was to begin building gardens — specifically, the Persian chahar bagh gardens of his homeland, their quadripartite layout divided by water channels representing the four rivers of paradise. His successors built on this foundation with increasing ambition and technical sophistication, producing at Shalimar Bagh in Kashmir, Nishat Bagh, and the gardens associated with the great Mughal monuments a body of garden work that is, in its best expressions, extraordinary.
Shalimar Bagh in Srinagar, reached by shikara across the glassy surface of Dal Lake in the early morning, is one of those travel experiences that people find themselves describing for years afterward. The garden ascends in terraces from the lakeside, its central water channel fed from the mountains above, its chinar avenues turning in October to a colour somewhere between gold and copper that the word autumn barely captures. The combination of Mughal geometry — the channels, the pavilions, the symmetrical planting — with the Kashmiri landscape of water, mountain, and light produces an effect of considerable, unhurried magnificence.
In the south, the garden traditions of Kerala and Karnataka operate in an entirely different register: lush, tropical, fragrant with frangipani and jasmine, the courtyards of traditional houses and the grounds of the great temples designed for shade, for the cooling of air, for the provision of flowers for daily ritual use. The Bolgatty Palace gardens in Kochi, the extraordinary Keraleeya Gramam garden village near Guruvayur, and the hillside spice gardens of Munnar and Wayanad offer a completely different understanding of what Indian garden culture has produced.
When to go: October to March for the north; November to February for Kerala, avoiding the monsoon. Kashmir gardens peak in late September to October for autumn colour.
Italy: Architecture’s Most Beautiful Outdoor Room
Fly into: Rome for Tivoli and the Lazio gardens; Florence for Tuscany; Naples for the Amalfi Coast and Ravello
The Italians invented the idea that a garden is simply the house, continued outdoors. Before the Renaissance gave us the giardino all’italiana, gardens were productive or symbolic spaces — useful, or allegorical, but not primarily experienced as architecture. The Italian Renaissance garden changed this fundamentally, establishing a vocabulary of terraced outdoor rooms, axial vistas, water features, and evergreen structure that has influenced every subsequent tradition of formal garden design across the world.
To understand this, you need to visit Villa d’Este at Tivoli, forty kilometres east of Rome in the foothills of the Apennines. Cardinal Ippolito II d’Este commissioned it in the 1560s on a steeply sloping hillside above an ancient town, and what resulted — from designs largely attributed to Pirro Ligorio — is the most theatrically ambitious water garden ever created. The hydraulic system that feeds its fountains, cascades, and the extraordinary water organ — which uses hydraulic pressure to force air through organ pipes, producing a low, mournful chord that carries across the terraces — was, at the time of its creation, among the most complex pieces of engineering in Europe. Standing at the top of the main axis and looking down through tier after tier of fountains and cascades to the plain of the Roman Campagna beyond, with the scent of box and cypress in the air and the sound of water everywhere, it is difficult to argue that garden design has produced anything more spectacular before or since.
For a more intimate expression of the tradition, Villa Gamberaia near Settignano in the Florentine hills offers everything that Tivoli has, concentrated into a space of domestic scale: a water parterre of extraordinary elegance, a long bowling green bordered by clipped cypress, a grotto, and views across the Arno valley that make the surrounding landscape feel like an extension of the garden. Quietly, without drama, it is one of the most perfect gardens in the world.
Ravello, on the Amalfi Coast, provides a third register entirely: Villa Cimbrone and Villa Rufolo, their gardens tumbling down clifftops above a sea of Mediterranean blue, offer the most dramatically sited garden experience available in Europe. The Terrace of Infinity at Villa Cimbrone — a stone balustrade at the garden’s most exposed point, overlooking a sheer drop to the sea — has been photographed by everyone from Greta Garbo to Gore Vidal, and the view from it, on a clear day, reaches as far as Sicily.
When to go: May and June for flowers and manageable temperatures; September and October for the light, reduced crowds, and autumn colour in the deciduous plantings.
France: Order, Grandeur, and the Art of the Grand Gesture
Fly into: Paris (CDG) for Versailles, the Tuileries, Vaux-le-Vicomte, and Chaumont-sur-Loire
The French formal garden is a philosophical position rendered in topiary and hydraulics. It says, with total confidence and not a trace of apology, that human reason is capable of imposing perfect order on the natural world, and that the imposition of this order is beautiful. This is not a position that every gardening tradition endorses — the Japanese Zen garden, the English landscape park, and the Australian native garden all begin from precisely the opposite premise — but the French execute it with such grandeur, such technical mastery, and such sheer visual impact that even those who instinctively prefer wildness to geometry find themselves, standing on the great terrace at Versailles and looking down the main axis toward the horizon, moved by its authority.
Versailles is the inevitable beginning, and it should not be skipped on the grounds of overcrowding or familiarity. The gardens designed by André Le Nôtre for Louis XIV from 1661 onward are, even by the standards of everything else on this list, something exceptional. The scale alone — eight hundred hectares of designed landscape extending the geometry of the palace outward to the treeline and beyond — is without parallel in European garden history. But scale alone is not what makes Versailles great. What makes it great is the precision of the thinking behind it: the way that geometry, perspective, and the management of water are combined to create an experience that feels as logically inevitable as a mathematical proof. This was, intentionally, garden design as a demonstration of power — the power of reason, of the state, and of the man who commanded both.
From Versailles, the itinerary writes itself. Vaux-le-Vicomte, Le Nôtre’s earlier masterpiece created for Nicolas Fouquet (and the garden that so impressed Louis XIV that he had Fouquet arrested and effectively stole his garden designer), is smaller and, many would argue, more beautiful — its composition tighter, its proportions more satisfying, its distance from Paris manageable in a comfortable afternoon. Chantilly, with its extraordinary water features and its extraordinary art collection in the château above, is another. And the Festival des Jardins at Chaumont-sur-Loire, held each summer in the grounds of a Loire valley château, is the most adventurous and creatively ambitious garden festival in Europe — a place where designers from around the world produce temporary show gardens of genuine experimental courage.
When to go: Late May for the roses at Versailles and Vaux; any weekend from June to September for Chaumont. The gardens at Versailles are open year-round, and the winter visit — bare trees revealing the architecture of the planting structure, low sun at a raking angle across the parterres — is underrated.
Japan: The Most Considered Gardens on Earth
Fly into: Osaka or Tokyo; Kyoto and Kanazawa are the essential garden destinations
To visit Japan’s great gardens without some understanding of what they are trying to do is perfectly possible, and still rewarding — they are visually extraordinary by any standard. But to visit them with even a basic grasp of the philosophical intentions behind them is to experience something considerably more interesting: the realisation that these are spaces designed to produce specific states of mind, and that they succeed, reliably, in doing so.
Kyoto is the centre of this world. The city contains more great gardens per square kilometre than anywhere else on earth, ranging from the karesansui dry gardens of its Zen temples — Ryōan-ji, with its fifteen stones on raked white gravel, remains the most famous and repays the early-morning visit that allows you to experience it in something approaching the contemplative silence for which it was designed — to the extraordinary stroll garden of Katsura Imperial Villa, arguably the single finest piece of garden design in the world.
Katsura, created in the early seventeenth century for Imperial Prince Toshihito, is visited only by prior arrangement through the Imperial Household Agency, and the bureaucratic process of obtaining that permission is entirely worth the effort. The garden unfolds around a central pond along a prescribed route that reveals its composition in carefully managed sequences — a technique called miegakure, hide-and-reveal — so that no single viewpoint shows you everything, and each turn discloses a composition you could not have predicted from the previous one. Teahouses, stone lanterns, stepping stones, and planting of extraordinary refinement punctuate the circuit. The experience, in the soft light of a May morning or the sharp clarity of an October afternoon, has no equivalent anywhere else in the world.
Beyond Kyoto, Kanazawa — on the Japan Sea coast, accessible from Kyoto or Tokyo by Shinkansen — contains Kenroku-en, considered one of the three finest gardens in Japan. Created by the Maeda lords over more than a century from the mid-seventeenth century onward, it combines the qualities considered essential to a perfect garden — spaciousness, seclusion, artifice, antiquity, abundant water, and broad views — with a planting sophistication that reveals new details on repeated visits. In winter, the garden’s pine trees are supported by yukitsuri — ropes strung from central poles to prevent snow damage to the branches, creating silhouettes of unexpected geometric beauty against grey winter skies.
When to go: Late March to mid-April for cherry blossom, though competition for accommodation at this period is fierce. Mid-October to mid-November for autumn colour in the maple and ginkgo plantings, which in Kyoto’s temple gardens reaches a chromatic intensity that photographs consistently fail to capture. Avoid Golden Week (late April to early May) and the peak summer heat of July and August.
The Netherlands: Five Million Tulips and a Tradition of Exquisite Precision
Fly into: Amsterdam (AMS); the Bollenstreek bulb fields are forty minutes by car or train from Schiphol
The Netherlands is a country that has, over four hundred years, turned an enthusiasm for flowers into a global industry, a cultural identity, and an aesthetic tradition of genuine sophistication. The tulip mania of the 1630s — when single bulbs of prized varieties changed hands at prices equivalent to Amsterdam canal houses — is the famous episode, and it is routinely cited as an example of collective financial irrationality. What is less often noted is what it reveals about the Dutch relationship with the flower as an object of almost philosophical intensity: not merely decorative, not merely commercial, but genuinely, seriously beautiful in ways that warranted the kind of attention — and, apparently, the kind of financial commitment — that other cultures reserved for paintings or sculpture.
That seriousness has produced, across the intervening centuries, a horticultural tradition unlike any other. The Netherlands is the world’s largest exporter of cut flowers and potted plants, a fact supported by the vast glasshouse complexes of the Westland and the astonishing mechanised efficiency of the Flora Holland flower auction at Aalsmeer — the largest commercial building in the world by footprint, processing some twenty million flowers daily and worth visiting at 5am, when the auction is in full swing, for one of the more surreal and genuinely impressive logistical spectacles available to the contemporary traveller.
Keukenhof, near Lisse in the South Holland bulb-growing district, opens for eight weeks each spring and receives well over a million visitors in that period, which gives you some sense of both its spectacle and the planning required to visit it comfortably. The thirty-two hectares of bulb planting — approaching eight million individual bulbs in beds of tulips, daffodils, hyacinths, muscari, and fritillaries — is overwhelming in the way that only genuinely extraordinary things can be. The colour management across the broad landscape, the sequencing of cultivars to extend the display across the full season, the individual breeding achievements on display (a black tulip; a tulip the colour of a bruised peach; a parrot tulip whose fringed and twisted petals look more like a ranunculus than any tulip you have previously encountered) — these are worth spending real time with, beyond the initial experience of simple, pleasurable sensory overload.
The canal gardens of Amsterdam and the smaller cities — the narrow, geometrically precise plots behind the canal houses, visible from the water on a boat tour or from bridges at strategic points throughout the city — are the domestic expression of the same tradition: orderly, precise, rich with seasonal plant interest, and maintained with a care that reflects a national relationship with outdoor space that goes well beyond mere tidiness.
When to go: Mid-April for peak tulip season at Keukenhof; the Bollenstreek bulb fields along the corridor between Haarlem and Leiden are at their most spectacular in the same window. Book ahead — both accommodation and Keukenhof entry sell out.
The United Kingdom: The Garden as National Passion
Fly into: London (LHR or LGW); Eurostar from St Pancras for the great gardens of Kent, Sussex, and beyond
There is a particular quality of light in an English garden on a good June day — soft, diffuse, slightly golden even at noon — that does more for mixed planting than any designer’s decision. Roses and delphiniums and geraniums that might look strident in Mediterranean sunlight are, in this light, simply perfect. It is the light that the English garden tradition has been designed for, and it is the light that makes the best English gardens look, at their peak, like someone has made a very large and very beautiful painting and then stepped inside it.
The English garden tradition is the most internationally influential of any discussed in these pages, and with good reason: it encompasses formal and informal, historical and contemporary, large-scale landscape and small-scale urban plot, with equal facility and equal excellence. But its particular genius — the quality that distinguishes it from every other tradition — is the herbaceous border: the long, deep planting of perennials, shrubs, bulbs, and annuals that is the English garden’s most characteristic and most copied contribution to world horticulture.
Great Dixter in East Sussex is where to go if you are serious about understanding what an English garden can be. Created by the gardener and writer Christopher Lloyd over more than half a century and now stewarded by his former head gardener Fergus Garrett, it is simultaneously one of the most historically resonant and one of the most contemporary gardens in Britain: exuberant, experimental, sometimes shocking in its colour combinations, always horticulturally brilliant. The Long Border, which stretches some sixty metres and is planted to peak in July and August, is the most famous example of sustained creative planting in the country. The Exotic Garden — a former rose garden replanted by Lloyd in the early 1990s with cannas, dahlias, bananas, and other tender plants for a deliberately tropical effect that many visitors found initially scandalous — is now one of the garden’s most celebrated and most imitated features.
Hidcote Manor Garden in Gloucestershire, created by the American-born Lawrence Johnston from 1907 onward, invented the garden-rooms concept — a series of enclosed outdoor spaces, each with its own planting character and colour scheme, linked by allées and gates — that has influenced garden design internationally ever since. Its Theatre Lawn, its Red Borders, its Bathing Pool garden are each beautiful individually; experienced in sequence, as Johnston intended, they build to something greater than the sum of their parts.
For the contemporary direction of British garden design, Chelsea remains the essential annual reference — five days each May in which the finest garden designers in the country (and increasingly the world) compete for gold medals and the sort of coverage that shapes horticultural taste for the following several years. The show gardens that win in the current era are those that demonstrate ecological intelligence alongside beauty — rich in structural planting, thoughtful about seasonal longevity, honest about the garden as a living system rather than a static display.
When to go: June for roses and the peak of the herbaceous border season; May for Chelsea and the general exuberance of late spring; October for autumn colour and the quieter pleasures of a garden past its summer peak but still full of interest.
Scandinavia: Where Winter Is Part of the Design
Fly into: Copenhagen (CPH); Stockholm (ARN); Oslo (OSL)
Most garden articles about Scandinavia focus, understandably, on summer — on the extraordinary, almost hallucinogenic quality of the long Nordic days, when the sun barely sets and the garden exists in a state of perpetual golden hour that makes everything growing in it look magnificent. This is entirely fair. A Scandinavian garden in high summer, at this latitude, in this light, is one of the most beautiful things available to the garden-minded traveller.
But to visit only in summer is to miss what makes Scandinavian garden design genuinely distinctive and genuinely interesting: its engagement with the other nine months. The Scandinavian garden tradition has been developed by gardeners who understood, from hard experience, that a garden designed only for July is a garden that fails for most of the year. The result — a design tradition that treats winter structure, autumn seedheads, spring bulbs, and the precise management of bark, berry, and twig as primary design considerations rather than afterthoughts — is one of the most intellectually rigorous and seasonally coherent in the world.
Copenhagen is the most immediately accessible of the Scandinavian capitals for garden tourism, and its contributions to the tradition are significant. The city’s extraordinary network of kolonihave allotments — small garden plots, typically of just a few hundred square metres, allocated to urban residents without private garden space — has a history stretching back to the late nineteenth century and represents one of the most design-conscious small garden traditions in the world. Each plot is intensely individual, maintained by its occupant with a horticultural commitment and aesthetic seriousness that reflects a broader Danish cultural conviction that good design, including garden design, is not a luxury but a basic component of a life well lived.
Stockholm‘s Rosendal Garden, a biodynamic market garden and public garden open year-round on the island of Djurgården, is one of the most quietly lovely designed spaces in Scandinavia: its walled kitchen garden, its orchard, its café in a nineteenth-century glasshouse, and its changing seasonal displays of cut flowers and vegetables represent the Scandinavian garden tradition at its most warmly accessible. The nearby Millesgården sculpture garden, arranged in terraces above the water at Lidingö, offers a very different register — monumental, architecturally formal, its stone terraces and reflective pools and Carl Milles bronzes creating a garden experience that is closer in spirit to the Italian terraced tradition than to anything typically Scandinavian.
In Norway, the gardens associated with the great artists’ homes — Edvard Grieg’s Troldhaugen outside Bergen, with its site above Nordåsvatnet and its simple, nature-connected planting — offer a different kind of garden experience: intimate, personal, shaped by the relationship between an exceptionally creative individual and a particular place. The Norwegian garden tradition, shaped by a landscape of extraordinary drama and a climate of considerable severity, tends toward exactly this kind of modesty and site-specificity — gardens that acknowledge, rather than compete with, the landscape they inhabit.
When to go: June and July for the famous light and the full summer display; October for the autumn colour in the beech and birch plantings; late January to February for the drama of snow on structural plantings and the particular beauty of the winter garden in Scandinavian light.
The United States: The New World’s Great Garden Conversation
Fly into: New York (JFK or EWR) for the High Line, Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and Wave Hill; Chicago (ORD) for Lurie Garden; Portland (PDX) for the Pacific Northwest native plant tradition
American garden culture is as large and as various as the continent it inhabits, and the attempt to summarise it in a single entry does it considerably less than justice. What can be said is that the United States has, across the past century, produced a small number of genuinely original landscape thinkers whose contributions to the international conversation have been substantial — and that the country’s public gardens and designed public landscapes are, at their best, extraordinary.
The High Line in New York is the most internationally discussed public garden project of the past twenty years, and it earns its reputation. The conversion of a disused elevated freight railway on Manhattan’s West Side into a linear park, planted by the Dutch designer Piet Oudolf with a naturalistic combination of ornamental grasses and long-season perennials, opened in phases from 2009 and rapidly became one of the most visited public spaces in the world. What makes it worth visiting, beyond the novelty of its elevated position above the streets and the interest of its industrial heritage, is the quality of the planting itself: Oudolf’s compositions, which change dramatically across the seasons from the fresh greens of spring through the complex tapestry of high summer to the bleached seedheads and skeletal grasses of winter, demonstrate with complete conviction that a garden does not need to be colourful and blooming to be beautiful.
Lurie Garden in Chicago’s Millennium Park, also planted by Oudolf, is similarly instructive — a five-acre garden in the heart of one of America’s great cities that manages to feel simultaneously wild and designed, seasonal and structurally coherent, ecologically sophisticated and immediately accessible to visitors with no horticultural background whatsoever. The late summer and autumn display, when the grasses and tall perennials reach their full height and the seedheads of rudbeckia, echinacea, and sanguisorba glow in the slanted light, is exceptional.
For the other great American garden tradition — the domestic garden designed for outdoor living, developed to its modern form in California from the 1930s onward by designers such as Thomas Church — the Bay Area is the destination. Church’s own garden in San Francisco’s Sea Cliff neighbourhood, along with gardens in Sonoma, Marin, and the hills above Berkeley that represent his characteristic idiom of functional simplicity, low-maintenance planting, and the dissolution of the boundary between house and garden, are the foundation of a tradition that has influenced residential garden design internationally.
When to go: May and June for the High Line and Lurie Garden in spring growth; late August to October for the peak of the naturalistic planting season and the extraordinary autumn light in both New York and Chicago.
Australia: The World’s Most Intelligent Garden Conversation
Fly into: Sydney (SYD); Melbourne (MEL); Perth (PER) for Western Australian native plants
Australia has, over the past thirty years, developed arguably the most intellectually honest garden tradition in the world. Not the most historically rich — that distinction belongs elsewhere on this list. Not the most visually spectacular, in the immediately obvious sense. But the most honest: because Australian garden design has been forced, by the realities of a climate that is warming faster than almost anywhere else on earth, by the water restrictions that are now a permanent feature of life in most Australian cities, and by the growing ecological understanding of what it costs to maintain a European-derived garden on a continent that evolved without any of its plants, to ask harder questions than any other national garden culture.
The answer that Australian garden design has arrived at — gradually, through decades of experiment and advocacy, and now with considerable confidence and style — is the native plant garden. Not the rough, scrubby approximation of bushland that was the first, somewhat apologetic version of native gardening in the 1970s and 1980s, but a genuinely designed, compositionally sophisticated, ecologically rich landscape that uses the extraordinary botanical wealth of the Australian native flora with the same creative ambition that the best European garden designers bring to their far more internationally familiar plant palettes.
The Royal Botanic Garden in Melbourne is the best introduction to this tradition for the international visitor, offering both a magnificent historic botanic garden of international standing and, increasingly, sections devoted to showcasing Australian native plants in designed settings of real quality. The associated Cranbourne Gardens, forty-five minutes south of the city, contains the Australian Garden — a designed landscape by Taylor Cullity Lethlean that is one of the finest pieces of public garden design produced anywhere in the world in the past two decades. The Red Sand Garden at its centre, a vast dry landscape of red Australian sand punctuated by sculptural banksia trunks and native grass plantings, is the kind of space that changes how you think about what a garden can be.
In Western Australia, the extraordinary spring wildflower season — from August to October, when the southwest corner of the continent produces a native floral display of such diversity and intensity that it has been declared one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots — offers a garden experience of a completely different kind: not designed, but the result of millions of years of evolutionary refinement in a landscape of extraordinary botanical richness. The Kings Park and Botanic Garden in Perth, one of the largest inner-city parks in the world, distils the best of this flora into a designed setting of real ambition.
When to go: August to October for the Western Australian wildflower season; October to April for Melbourne and Sydney gardens, avoiding the worst of the summer heat. The Cranbourne Australian Garden is open year-round and is excellent in every season.
Before you disembark from this particular journey, a few practical notes for the garden-minded traveller.
The garden visit repays more time than most travellers give it. Arriving at opening and staying until the light changes is almost always worth the rearranged itinerary. The great gardens — Katsura, Villa d’Este, the Alhambra, Great Dixter — reward a second visit within the same trip, if time allows, and always reveal something that the first visit missed.
Gardens are, by their nature, time-specific. The garden you visit in May is not the same garden you would visit in October. If a place captures you, note the season and return in a different one: you will be surprised by how different, and how equally rewarding, the experience can be.
The best garden visits often happen in the early morning, before the crowds and in the best light. This requires planning — reserved entry tickets, nearby accommodation, a willingness to forgo a leisurely hotel breakfast in favour of something more interesting. It is, consistently, worth it.
And finally: buy the plants. Many of the great gardens sell plants propagated from their own collections, and there is no better souvenir of a garden visit, and no better way of bringing something of the experience home, than a plant grown from the garden that inspired you. It will, in a good year, reward your attention every season for the rest of your gardening life.
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