Recently someone asked me what the health and well-being benefits of a designed garden actually are. It took me a moment to articulate something I'd always taken for granted. Everyone knows gardens are good for you, right? But why?

The Royal Park’s new garden opened on 27 April 2026, on the site of the old glasshouses. The rubble became the paths, over 40 trees were chosen for a warming climate, and the planting nods to the late Queen’s life.

Hilliers have been growing plants near Winchester since 1864, and the winter garden here rivals Wisley. Coloured bark, scent, stems worth planting en masse, and a warning about what b=nurseries mean by “dwarf”.

Better known for the Great British Bake-Off, but the snowdrops came first: five acres under the beeches, a reputed 73 cultivars, and a queue for the car park that made the pub a mile away look very appealing

Ten rods, roughly 250 square metres, and on the site I visited an eight year wait to get one. A short history of the English allotment, and what three of our South Park Gardens volunteers have made of theirs.

Horticultural, edible, cultural and shoppable, and once a residential college for women gardeners, run by the formidable Beatrix Havergal. Allow several hours, and take a pcinic.

A garden is better for having peaks and quiet times. What flowers in the cold months, what is going on under the leaf litter, and the best argument I know for doing almost nothing in the garden in winter.

The first National Trust property I have visited where the garden, not the house, is the point', Ludwig Messel’s Grade II listed garden, a ruin kept as a gothic folly, and a rock garden with more attitide than most.

Having done Villandry, Chaumont and Chenonceau, I went looking for a hidden gem on the other Loir. Not quite hidden, but the unpublicised organic kitchen garden was worth the pidgin French.

Remember the rewilded beaver garden? It went to a mental health chaity in Buckinghamshire. Where Chelsea’s best show gardens end up, and who finds £250,000 a garden once Project Giving Back stops after 2026?

It is very easy to visit Richmond Park regularly and miss this altogether. Deer kept out, azaleas kept in: the National Collection of Wilson 50 Kurume azaleas, at its loudest in late April.

when you come across a lawn of crocuses in their tricolour array of white, yellow and purple it can stop you in your tracks

Twelve months, twelve photographs: a brutal January on Wimbledon Common, Wakehurst in February, the ancient laurel forest in Madeira, Sarah Price at Chelsea, and the year I finally learned to design gardens in 3D.

The only reasonably sensible list for gardeners: no cashmere pyjamas, no pink suede gauntlets. Felco, Showa, Silky Fox, a day out with lunch, and one bespoke cedar greenhouse for the ambitious.

Smaller and far easier to walk than Wisley, and a corrective to my southern view of gardening up north. Salvias Amistad, Black and Blue, and Hotlips all thriving in North Yorkshire.

I did not expect to like it. 14,000 perennials, 120 metres of beech hedging and 60,000 bulbs later, it is the best argument I know for planting a garden that peaks in autumn.

The chateau and the historic grounds are the reason to go. The festival gardens are walk-through rather than roped-off, which I like, but do not arrive expecting Chelsea standards.

A garden three decades in the making in rural Normandy: sculptural hedges, a reflecting pond, grass borders and the unforgettable feather garden of tall summer flowering perennials, improbably inspired by Derek Jarman’s garden in Dungeness.

It’s been a few years since my last visit to Ham House. The garden has a strong French influence: formal avenues of trees radiating out from the house and the garden is divided into a number of smaller, though still very large by modern standards, walled areas.