The world's 50 most beautiful gardens - Part Two: Asia, Africa, Australasia, and the Americas

The world's 50 most beautiful gardens - Part Two: Asia, Africa, Australasia, and the Americas

Bagh-e Fin, Iran
This venerable garden - the oldest surviving in Iran - was completed in about 1590 by the early Safavids. . . [full details]
Photograph by Jerry Harpur

Donnell Garden, USA
Sometimes known as El Novillero, this iconic garden in Sonoma Valley, northern California, was designed by Thomas Church for the Donnell family in 1937. . . [full details]

Dumbarton Oaks, USA
This garden was largely the creation of Mrs Mildred Bliss, wife of a high-ranking American diplomat, working in long-term collaboration - from 1920 - with the designer Beatrix Farrand, who also hailed from the American aristocracy. . . [full details]

Huntington Library Cactus Garden, USA
The Huntington's cacti collection was developed in the early 20th century by William Hertrich, the reputedly irascible German director of gardens. . . [full details]
Photograph by Clive Nichols

Innisfree, USA
This marvellous American garden was begun by Walter Beck, a painter and teacher who moved to the site in the late Twenties after marrying Marion Stone, whose family owned the land in New York State. . . [full details]
Photograph by Alamy

Kirstenbosch, South Africa
Without doubt the most dramatically situated botanic garden in the world, nestled on the landward side of Table Mountain outside Cape Town, Kirstenbosch is also one of the world's most important botanical institutions. . . [full details]
Photograph by Alamy

La Majorelle, Morocco
No less a personage than Yves Saint Laurent rescued this Marrakesh garden from ruination in the Sixties, restoring it to how it was in its prime. . . [full details]
Photograph by Marianne Majerus

Las Pozas, Mexico
English eccentric and patron of surrealism Edward James built this place over 20 years starting in the Fifties. . . [full details]
Photograph by Alamy

Les Quatre Vents, Canada
Hidden away in a backwater of Quebec, eastern Canada, is "Four Winds", a garden that is a veritable palimpsest of 20th-century European garden style. . . [full details]
Photograph by Andrea Jones

Liu Yuan, China
A garden extravaganza of many and various moods and moments, the Liu Yuan (in the suburbs of Suzhou) was constructed by the family of the same name during the early 19th century. . . [full details]
Photograph by Alamy

LongHouse Reserve, USA
There are hundreds of sculpture gardens around the world, but very few indeed boast the poise and panache of LongHouse, on Long Island outside Manhattan. . . [full details]
Photograph by Andrea Jones

Millennium Park, Chicago
The skyscraper skyline of Chicago - second only to Manhattan's and in some ways more interesting - provides the backdrop to this magnificent new park. . . [full details]
Photograph by Alamy

Miller House, USA
A small town in Indiana is not perhaps the first place one would look for an icon of 20th-century landscape design, but Columbus, Indiana, boasts the garden of the Miller House, earliest and most celebrated full-scale work of Dan Kiley. . . [full details]

Missouri Botanical Garden, USA
Founded in St Louis in 1819 by Englishman Henry Shaw, Missouri's is the USA's oldest botanical garden and is widely acknowledged as the most attractive. . . [full details]
Photograph by Clive Nichols

Monteiro, Brazil
Brazilian designer Roberto Burle Marx was a giant of 20th-century landscape design and Monteiro is generally considered to be his major work. . . [full details]
Photograph by Andrea Jones

Naumkeag, USA
Truly a one-off, this garden in the Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts was made to exude confidence and originality. . . [full details]

Peterhof, Russia
Peter the Great's summer palace was constructed in short order from 1716 and is best known for its extraordinary array of water features and the gilded opulence of its statuary. . . . [full details]
Photograph by Alamy

Ryoanji, Japan
The most celebrated Japanese garden of all - the mother of all dry gravel gardens - does not disappoint. . . [full details]
Photograph by Getty

Saihoji, Japan
Known in the West as "the moss garden", this wooded temple garden in Kyoto has taken on an almost mythic status. . . [full details]
Photograph by Getty

Shalamar Bagh, Kashmir
This is a sumptuous royal garden where water symbolises life and refreshment, but also absolute power. . . [full details]
Photograph by Alamy

Tsarskoe Selo, Russia
From 1762 Catherine the Great converted the gardens of this royal palace near St Petersburg into something more in line with the fashionable English landscape garden. . . [full details]
Photograph by Alamy

Viceroy's Palace Garden, India
This garden is a felicitous fusion of old India and old England. . . . [full details]
Photograph by Jerry Harpur