The world's 50 most beautiful gardens - Part one: Europe

The world's 50 most beautiful gardens - Part one: Europe

In the first part of our definitive guide, Tim Richardson picks the most fabulous gardens in Britain and on the Continent

Alhambra, Spain

The fabled patios of this Moorish fortress-palace in Granada, constructed between the 9th and 14th centuries, still retain an extraordinary sequestered atmosphere. . . [full details]

Photograph by Marianne Majerus

Bagatelle, France

This Parisian park was created round a small château in the 1770s as the result, it is said, of a bet between Marie-Antoinette and the Comte d'Artois, whom she challenged to create a garden in two months flat. . . [full details]

Photograph by Alamy


Bodnant, Wales

It was the 2nd Baron Aberconway who largely created this extraordinarily ambitious terraced garden between 1904 and 1914. . . [full details]

Photograph by Andrew Lawson

Courances, France

Created in the mid-17th century - reputedly by Jean, father of the great Andre Le Nôtre - this garden is filled with water in many moods, although it is serenity that sets the tone. . . [full details]

Photograph by Alamy

Crathes Castle, Scotland

The late Graham Stuart Thomas reckoned that in its heyday under the care of Lady Sybil Burnett, this garden was even better than Gertrude Jekyll's own Munstead Wood, which Thomas had visited in her lifetime. . . [full details]

Photograph by Andrew Lawson


Garden of Cosmic Speculation, Scotland

The architectural theorist Charles Jencks created this garden of turfed terraces and imaginative sculptural incident, having been inspired by the experiments in large-scale feng shui gardening (using a bulldozer) of his wife. . . [full details]

Photograph by Andrea Jones


Levens Hall, England

There has been much debate about the actual date of the celebrated yew topiary forms at Levens Hall in Cumbria, which so captured the imaginations of Edwardian garden writers. . . [full details]

Photograph by Garden Collection


Hidcote, England

The American Lawrence Johnston may have been plant-mad but he also instinctively understood the importance of design in any garden that aspires to greatness. . . [full details]

Photograph by Alamy

Isola Bella, Italy

A garden that looks like a ship is worthy of celebration indeed, and this extraordinary place - situated in the middle of Lake Maggiore and accessible only by boat - does not fail to live up to expectations. . . [full details]

Photograph by Alamy


Giverny, France

Claude Monet's dreamy garden in Normandy is extremely well maintained; visitors can gain a sense of the symbiosis of his horticultural and artistic interests. . . [full details]


Little Sparta, Scotland

The poet and sculptor Ian Hamilton Finlay created this world-renowned garden in the Pentland Hills near Edinburgh over the course of 40 years. . . [full details]

Photograph by Andrew Lawson

Giardino Giusti, Italy

In On the Making of Gardens (1909) Sir George Sitwell of Renishaw Hall described the "intensely solemn loveliness" of this urban garden in Verona, which takes a hold of most people who visit it. . . [full details]

Photograph by Alamy


Het Loo, Netherlands

Very few grand 17th-century European Baroque gardens have made it into this selection but the restored palace of Het Loo near Apeldoorn is an exception. . . [full details]

Photograph by Andrew Lawson

Ninfa, Italy

After visiting this garden near Rome, many people list Ninfa as their favourite garden of all. It has an atmosphere all its own, perhaps because of the unique way it came into being. . . [full details]

Photograph by Andrew Lawson

Rousham, England

Treasured as much for the idiosyncratic, defiantly non-commercial way it is run, Rousham, in Oxfordshire, has earned a special place in Britain's garden pantheon. . . [full details]

Photograph by Marianne Majerus


Tarot Garden, Italy

The French-American artist Niki de Saint Phalle created this extraordinary sculpture garden in Tuscany from 1978 until her death in 1998. . . [full details]

Photograph by Alamy


Sissinghurst, England

The garden as it stands today may bear little resemblance to how it was in Vita Sackville-West's "ramshackle farm-tumble" time but Sissinghurst in Kent is gardened to an extremely exacting standard. . . [full details]

Photograph by Garden Collection


Stourhead, England

For many this is the greatest set-piece triumph of the 18th-century English landscape movement, a garden of temples, grottoes and other mythical moments set around a mystical lake that acts as its beating heart. . . [full details]

Photograph by David Burges

Mount Stewart, Northern Ireland

The hilltop Temple of the Winds by James "Athenian" Stuart that overlooks Strangford Lough is all that survives of a great garden made here in the late 18th century for the 1st Marquess of Londonderry. . . [full details]

Photograph by Alamy

Powis Castle, Wales

This is a garden which inspires passionate devotion among a large segment of the garden cognoscenti; it draws people back again and again. . . [full details]

Photograph by Andrew Lawson



Studley Royal, England

This stupendous landscape garden is set in a steep-sided valley, with smooth lawns, still pools, serene temples and pure-white classical statuary in the valley bottom. . . [full details]


Vaux-le-Vicomte, France

This is the garden that so enraged Louis XIV that he had its owner imprisoned. . . [full details]

Photograph by Alamy

Villandry, France

This garden is a visual, sensual triumph, with the vegetables in the nine squares of the formal potager garden chosen as much for their looks as their culinary value. . . [full details]

Photograph by Andrew Lawson


Villa Lante, Italy

For the majority of seasoned visitors, this garden just east of Viterbo is simply the most sublime Renaissance garden experience of all. . . [full details]

Photograph by Andrew Lawson


Worlitz, Germany

That Enlightenment progressive and garden-lover Prince Anhalt-Dessau created this 300-acre garden near Dessau in the late 18th century partly as a homage to the English landscape garden. . . [full details]