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.

It’s winter. I’m not a great one for curling up by the fire with a seed catalogue. Ten books instead: three I reach for at work, three worth reading for the writing alone, and four I look at with deep-seated envy.

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?

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.