The most beautiful gardens in the uk for a weekend away

Classic British country house hotels with fine gardens for summer overnighters to uplift souls and senses

23 July 2023

All products are independently selected by our editors. If you buy something, we may earn an affiliate commission.

Across the UK, there are endless green spaces and public gardens waiting to be explored. From the UK's most beautiful national parks to the prettiest parks in London, the country is awash with verdant corners, towering trees and vast rolling hills. The top UK hotels are doing their best to maintain the flora and fauna of our green and pleasant land – below are our favourite gardens in the UK that you can also book for a weekend break.

Jenny Zarins
Somerset
The Newt
Amid Somerset’s rolling valleys, The Newt and its estate constitute a hallowed tract of earth on which visionary gardeners have left their mark over centuries. Margaret Hobhouse instilled the Victorian ideal, with colour, a greenhouse and beech, oak, pine, walnut and cedar trees. Penelope Hobhouse gave the land a new life in the 1970s, followed by Nori and Sandra Pope, maestros of exuberant hues. The 2013 arrival of current owners Karen Roos and Koos Bekker – creators of Babylonstoren in South Africa – heralded a five-year era of landscaping under French designer Patrice Taravella. So much is folded into their vaulting vision: aside from the garden restaurant and three museums (including a replica Romano-British villa), there is a working farm, a no-dig kitchen garden, orchards, a stag-filled wood- land, pastures for British White cows, an apple-tree maze and abundant ornamental planting. The great outdoors pairs with faultless, design- forward interiors in rooms that are divided between the 17th-century Hadspen House, stables and outbuildings, and The Farmyard, a far-flung converted dairy. The D-shaped, walled Parabola garden is an ode to apples; its outside is coated with fanned trellises of plums, figs, crab apples and jostaberries. The free-flow Arts and Crafts-y Cottage Garden ripples with chocolate cosmos in high summer, its dinky thatched cottage packed with sprays; the Victorian Terrace is a colour-coordinated structured feast. The “gourd caterpillar tunnel” peaks in the warmer months, when it’s a riot of tromboncino, bottleneck, speckled swan and rainbow ornamentals, every inch bursting with luscious droopiness. Lydia Bell
Price: Doubles from £520
Website: thenewtinsomerset.com
Book your stay: thenewtinsomerset.com
Mary Quincy
Oxfordshire
Le Manoir aux Quat'saisons
It may be a Belmond hotel, but this 15th-century Chilterns manor, two Michelin-starred restaurant and cookery school will always be Raymond Blanc’s bébé – the most beautiful Franco-British love-in since the Entente Cordiale. Down the lavender walkway, and past a dovecote wreathed in molasses-flavoured figs, is a chef-focused garden par excellence, with every inch accounted for. (Complaints about this should be answered by the dégustation menu, an ode to it all.) There are realms of herb and micro- herb beds, a two-acre vegetable plot with 90-odd varieties and a mushroom garden replete with shiitake, maitake and parasol species. Blanc is staving off his anxiety about declining English and French orchards with 2,500 apple, pear and quince trees, and there are also beehive zones, sloe and plum fruit hedges and cloche tunnels fragrant with sweet, sherbety lemon verbena. Ornamental pockets include a high-density wild-flower meadow with a four-by-four-inch planting grid; and Robert Ketchell’s Japanese Tea Garden, with its Shinto essence, pea-green waters and stepping stones. A sculpture of Blanc’s beloved Maman watches over the herb garden. It was she who sent him to forage in the French countryside for wild morels as a child and taught him to allow an ingredient to shine, not to drown its essence. His father, a vegetable gardener, planted beds here too. Tricks of the trade can be imbibed at the Raymond Blanc Gardening School, which was the first hotel horticultural academy in England, cocreated with head gardener Anne-Marie Owens. LB
Price: Doubles from £980
Website: belmond.com
Book your stay: booking.com
Clive Nichols Garden Pictures
Lincolnshire
Easton Walled Gardens
After being ravaged during the Second World War, when it served as a barracks, the Elizabethan-era Easton Hall was pulled down in 1951 by Sir Hugh Cholmeley, whose family has owned the estate since 1561. Now, only the stables, the gatehouse and the ghostly limestone ruins of the house remain. Two decades ago, Ursula Cholmeley set about restoring the lost gardens, which had become overrun with sycamores and brambles. Today, they comprise 12 acres. A woodland walk is crammed with pink hellebores, yellow epimediums and snowdrops in spring, while a more contemporary white garden is home to silver- leaved shrubs, ornamental grasses and white-flowered perennials. Adjoining the cottage and vegetable gardens is The Pickery: a cut-flower garden where, in midsummer, Cholmeley’s huge collection of delicious modern and heritage sweet peas takes centre- stage. One of her bravura designs was to transform the terraced lawns into spectacular wild-flower meadows. Most ethereal is the south-facing one in the estate’s original Tudor enclosure. Here, inspired by her mother-in-law (another prodigious gardener), she trains wild roses and rose shrubs on bespoke metal structures, to create spectacular mounds of scented blooms, which float above the long grass, and meadow flowers, such as wild vetches and orchids. Breezy cottages set within the gardens include the turreted stone Gatehouse Lodge with pretty interiors and seductive views across the estate. CLARE COULSON
Price: Two-night stay at The Gatehouse Lodge from £470
Website: eastonholidaycottages.co.uk
Book your stay: eastonholidaycottages.co.uk
Claire Takacs
West Sussex
Gravetye Manor
From 1885, Gravetye Manor was home to William Robinson, the influential Irish horticulture writer who encouraged the Victorians to forego gaudy bedding in favour of naturalistic wildness, woodland, sweeping meadows and borders that ramped up the natural and native. The property became a country house hotel in the 1950s and, for the past 13 years, head gardener Tom Coward has been restoring the 30-acre gardens around this Elizabethan gem (the house dates from 1598), set in a wider 1,000-acre estate. “Our job is to continue Robinson’s work,” says Coward. A succession of bulbs light up the meadows from late winter to summer, while swathes of sky-blue camassia leichtlinii caerulea rise up under the orchard’s apple trees in spring. By June, the white wisteria Shiro-noda springs into life and the flower garden begins its summer fireworks. The garden works in symbiosis with the Michelin-starred kitchen, where head chef George Blogg turns out exquisitely beautiful dishes that heavily feature produce from the one-and-a-half-acre walled kitchen garden. In many ways it’s the engine room, where horticulture meets haute cuisine. Rooms are cosily comfortable (the Robinson suite has superlative garden views) but the lure of the outdoors is too strong to stay inside. CC
Price: Doubles from £385
Website: gravetyemanor.co.uk
Book your stay: booking.com

Nathan Rollinson @therollinson
Gloucestershire
Barnsley House
It wasn’t until a riding accident in her late 40s curtailed her sporting life that Rosemary Verey turned her hand to gardening, becoming one of England’s most beloved garden designers in the 1980s and making her honeyed-stone home something of a pilgrimage site. Having worked for King Charles at Highgrove, and taking inspiration from gardens across the world, Verey cultivated a talent for translating grand ideas to a smaller scale. Her own modest couple of acres included a gothic summer house, a salvaged pond temple, a laburnum-and-yew walk, a knot garden and perfect parterres. Since 2003, these have formed part of Barnsley House hotel, which retains the spirit of the family home it used to be. Jennifer Danbury, the current head gardener, stays true to Verey’s flowering cycles: it’s all about roses, dahlias, salvias and pelargoniums in summer. The natural feel of the garden is charming, with the sort of wild profusions in beds that might inspire amateur imitation. Increasingly, the no-dig raised beds and kitchen garden – with apple trees pruned into goblet shapes, fruit cages and riots of flowers among the vegetables – service the spa and hotel restaurant. It’s a nice touch to discover that the rosemary used in a facial, or the pudding rhubarb, comes from just yards away. JESSICA FELLOWES
Price: Doubles from £430
Website: barnsleyhouse.com
Book your stay: booking.com
Sim Canetty-Clarke
Aberdeenshire
The Fife Arms
“I wanted to weave the Victorian excitement of plant-hunters going off to the Himalayas, Hindu Kush and China, and returning with new and exciting treasures,” says Jinny Blom, designer of the garden at The Fife Arms in Braemar. Spilling out from the back of the hotel, it mixes far-flung plants with wild Scottish roses and rowan. So much here is not just beautiful but useful, such as bog myrtle, bane of the dreaded Highland midge, and so satisfyingly springy – like swathes of cushions. Sitting in a natural amphitheatre created by the Grampian Mountains, the village of Braemar is an oasis of bloom and leaf. Lanes leading off into the remotest Cairngorms are edged with sorrel and juniper, which feels in keeping with the intoxi- cating spirit of The Fife Arms’ garden, the rooms of its 19th-century hunting lodge and many of the 16,000 artworks, antiques and curios here. On one bedroom wall hangs an oil landscape by Edwardian Glasgow painter Thomas Hope Mackay, the trees a hazy joy of rust and orange Highland leaves. Over breakfast, a sleepy bumblebee keeps headbutting the window of the dining room that overlooks the garden and the river Clunie rushing below. The perpet- ual sound of that densely pebbled river in full tilt is audible throughout the hotel – and in the garden, which feels both wild and lulling, and full of possibilities. Antonia Quirke
Price: Doubles from £434
Website: thefifearms.com
Book your stay: thefifearms.com

TopicsUK England Scotland Wales

Somerset

Oxfordshire

Lincolnshire

West Sussex

Gloucestershire

Aberdeenshire