By Molly Malsom

Published: Saturday, 20 August 2022 at 12:00 am

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Mount Stewart, County Down

During the 18th and 19th centuries, the aggrandisement of an earlier Georgian house by a potent political dynasty, the Marquesses of Londonderry, went hand in hand with the expansion of the grounds.

Politics took over the garden too, with prominent figures depicted as dodos, monkeys and other cartoonists’ delights strutting their stuff on bridges and outdoor buildings.

But there is much more to the garden than a mere flexing of political muscle: the trees and shrubs make up a collection that is not only remarkable for its variety and maturity, but also for the sensitive way they are positioned in the landscape and attractively underplanted.

Of the formal garden rooms, the Italian Garden is densely planted and satisfyingly ornate; on the wilder side a white stag stands poised for flight in a meadow setting backed by silver birches. Look out too for James ‘Athenian’ Stuart’s ravishing banqueting hall of 1782-5 and Tir N’an Og, the family burial ground.

Visit Mount Stewart

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Landform Ueda, Edinburgh

Remember the iconic V&A advertising slogan of 30 years ago – ‘An ace caff with quite a nice museum attached’? Something similar could be said of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh and its supremely satisfying landform design, created by Charles Jencks in 2001.

Inspired by chaos theory and the shapes found in nature, it’s an eye-catcher to end all eye-catchers: a swirling free-form composition, 3,000 metres square, of sculpted pools and ribs of grass contained by aluminium strips.

A spiral path rises to a grassy spine that is terraced on one side and smoothed out on the other. As a come-hither to a public building it has never been bettered – and actually the museum it serves, with its extensive international collection of post-1900 works, is rather more than ‘quite nice’.

Visit Landform Ueda

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Barrington Court, Somerset

There has been a house on this site, in the picturesque village of Barrington on the edge of the Somerset levels, since Domesday, but the survival of the 16th-century court and its imposing 17th-century stable block, Strode House, is something of a miracle.

When the National Trust, in partnership with the Lyle family (of Golden Syrup fame), took it on in 1907 it was all but derelict, with owls hooting in the rafters and pigs and cattle pressing against the windows.

In 1917 Arthur Lyle commissioned J E Forbes to lay out to the west of the buildings a five-acre mosaic of formal gardens and a substantial walled kitchen garden, creating the ideal estate. The aged, nearly blind but still redoubtable Gertrude Jekyll, with the aid of Barrington soil sent to her in biscuit tins, supplied planting plans for the Lily Garden, the Rose and Iris Garden and the White Garden.

The kitchen garden is filled with flowers as well as produce, and in autumn the cider orchards on three sides of the court carry their cargo of over 100 varieties of local and heritage apples.

Visit Barrington Court

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Scampston Hall, North Yorkshire

The 80 acres of gardens and park have a champion pedigree, laid out by Charles Bridgeman and ‘Capability’ Brown. But it is the way Dutch landscape designer Piet Oudolf has choreographed the derelict 4.5-acre walled garden that really takes the breath away today. Make first for the Mount, a flat-topped grass pyramid set among rows of flowering cherry trees, and survey the tapestry of framed spaces below.

A perennial meadow in the centre of the garden is the most pointilliste of the plantings, for the overall design relies on a structure of boldly monochrome arrangements, with each space making a dramatic statement through repetition. Pillars, strips or curves of topiary and grasses, and a 500m-long lime walk underplanted with flowering plants ensure the mix and movement are intoxicating.

Visit Scampston Hall

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Througham Court Garden, Gloucestershire

In this marvellously thoughtful and innovative garden, Christine Facer Hoffman has overlaid and interwoven Norman Jewson’s Arts & Crafts garden with joyful plantings that vary from exuberantly colourful borders to a serenely contemplative grove of black bamboos. This is only half the story, however, for she has embraced Geoffrey Jellicoe’s dictum: ‘A garden should be a voyage for the mind as well as the feet’.

Her own scientifically trained mind became fascinated by the complex patterns found in maths, astronomy and nature, and when she switched careers from medicine to landscape architecture they followed her into the garden, expressed as mind-challenging gates, seats, stone balls and steel hoops. This is science lightly worn, however: the plantings are relaxed, the combinations often unexpected, the effect literally enchanting.

Arresting touches abound: a circular pool and rill made of slivers of blue and purple slates, tall red and purple banners fluttering beyond a grove of white birches, a Portland stone bookshelf in the Library Garden and steps covered in bright red astroturf leading up to a lime walk. You are guaranteed never to be bored.

Visit Througham Court Garden

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Tremenheere, Cornwall

In Cornwall the sea is never very far away, but Tremenheere has the additional blessing of a stunning view out to Mount’s Bay and St Michael’s Mount.

It is a most intriguing, perhaps unique site: the 11 acres have been layered by time and man’s activity into a series of broad tranches, with an ancient wooded valley at the bottom of the steeply sloping terrain, a grassy band (farmed from the 1820s) running like a cummerbund along the middle, and a hanging wood of Turkey oaks at the brow of the hill.

Here Neil Armstrong and Jane Martin have masterminded a most exciting large-scale subtropical garden, populated by sculptures and installations by the likes of Kishio Suga, David Nash and James Turrell. The caff is ace too!

Visit Tremenheere

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Sarah Raven’s Cutting Garden, East Sussex

All gardeners – nervous , jaded and everything in between – should put this inspiring place on their visiting list this summer during one of the open days taking place at selected dates between April and September.

The old farmhouse is superbly positioned with Brightling Beacon as a borrowed eye-catcher in the distance, and the different gardens in two acres are filled with vivid architectural foliage, fizzing with ravishing colour combinations, and imbued with a spirit of change and experiment.

Running the whole gamut of edible, medicinal and floriferous plants, this is a teaching garden on a grand and pain-free scale – the Sarah Raven catalogues brought vividly and fragrantly to life. Plus lunches and teas to linger over, plants and presents to buy and courses to book galore.

Visit Sarah Raven’s Cutting Garden

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Marks Hall, Essex

Although the hall was demolished in 1950, the 200 acres of gardens and arboretum have developed an important identity of their own. At their heart lies a sloping two-acre garden redesigned by Brita von Schoenaich in 1999.

Enclosed on three sides by 18th-century brick walls, it is blessed with a sheltered microclimate where a dazzling range of unusual and exotic plants flourish. The way patterns have been created with hedges, walls and paving to outline or enclose the cool or fiery plantings adds movement and drama. Oh, and the double border is 525-feet long.

The fourth side opens out on to a lake, and then it’s the turn of the fine collection of often unfamiliar trees in the surrounding arboretum to grab the attention. It’s worth setting aside several hours to explore the woodland walks in the wider landscape too, where wildlife abounds in specially designated habitats. A stimulating and mind-provoking day out for all the family.

Visit Marks Hall

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Houghton Hall, Norfolk

Houghton is a swagger house – a Palladian pile designed in the 1720s for George II’s Prime Minister, Robert Walpole, by James Gibbs, Colen Campbell and William Kent. For the whole of the 19th century its future seemed precarious, but the 7th Marquess of Cholmondeley, continuing the rescue of house and park undertaken by his grandparents, planted new avenues and groups of trees to frame the house.

However, his supreme gift to Houghton has been to mastermind a garden of enviable scale and sophistication. The derelict five-acre walled kitchen garden was redesigned in 2003 with the help of Julian and Isabel Bannerman, whose trademark architectural eye-catchers include a rustic temple decorated with antlers and a grotto fountain spouting through giant clam shells.

The scale and subtlety of the planting in the dozen or so different compartments, divided by axial walks, is really phenomenal throughout. There’s only space here for a few appetite-whetters: the sumptuously deep double herbaceous border, the yew-framed rose garden astonishing in its scale and density of planting, and a laburnum garden with a surreal fire-and-water feature by Jeppe Hein.

Visit Houghton Hall

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