An English Garden Education: 5 to Visit Outside London

Poet and writer Vita Sackville-West and her husband, diplomat and writer Harold Nicolson, started Sissinghurst’s nine-acre garden in the 1930s to fill the void of Sackville-West losing her childhood home. The grand Knole House, in Kent, with more than 300 rooms, was entailed on the male heir of the Sackville family.

Famously unorthodox, the couple, outliers of the notorious Bloomsbury Group, lived and gardened harmoniously, while pursuing lengthy affairs with members of the same sex. (Her lovers included Virginia Woolf.) Together they built a garden that has become a global benchmark for artistic but contained horticulture, demarcated by Nicolson’s structured garden rooms and Sackville-West’s inspired plantings, which arguably derived more from her poetic appreciation for flowers and plants than it did from traditional gardening strictures.

See it from above, in the stone tower—it was Sackville-West’s writing room and remains untouched. In particular, look for the circular yew hedge, which forms the rondel, a defining feature alongside the Yew Walk, the Lime Walk, and the Nuttery. Note the cleverly contrived passageways linking the rooms.

Shards of color from red-hot pokers (a childhood favorite of Sackville-West’s) pierce the verdant greenery of the South Cottage Garden. And roses abound: Blush rambler rampantly twines through old apple trees in the Orchard; Rosa mulliganii arches over the central pergola in the White Garden. “Gray clumps of foliage, pierced here and there with tall white flowers” is how Sackville-West described it. This is modest. To linger in the White Garden is the closest thing to standing within a love sonnet.

Location: Biddenden Road, Cranbrook, Weald of Kent
Distance from London: Ninety minutes southeast
Season: Year-round, 11 A.M. to 5:30 P.M. (Check website January through March for restricted opening times.)
Best Time to Visit: May and June. Arrive promptly at 11 A.M. to avoid the crowds and be gone by 1 P.M. (Move on to Great Dixter for the same reason.) nationaltrust.org.uk.

If Sissinghurst is a lesson in restrained abundance, then Christopher Lloyd’s garden at his beloved childhood home of Great Dixter, in East Sussex, is a celebration of the overblown, and living proof that the statement “more is more” need not be pejorative.

Every nook and cranny of the garden’s six acres is crammed with a riot of color and texture. Lloyd, known in Britain as a legendary gardening writer and plantsman, acknowledged that his type of gardening was labor-intensive, and nowhere is this more in evidence than in his long, deep mixed borders that combine shrubs, trees, perennials, annuals, and bulbs.

Everywhere one walks, plants not so much battle as dance together, sometimes in soft clouds of unruly color and at other times in stark contrasts or eccentric symphonies. “If I think a yellow candelabrum of mullein will look good rising from a quilt of pink phlox, I’ll put it there,” wrote Lloyd, who died in 2006. He and Fergus Garrett, head gardener since 1994, famously tore up Sir Edwin Lutyens’s original rose garden and replaced it with a tropical one, filling it with dahlias, cannas, and purple Verbena bonariensis.

The Lutyens connection is reason enough to go. A powerhouse architect behind the Arts and Crafts movement, he was commissioned by Lloyd’s father in 1910 to oversee the renovation and extension of the house and the construction of the garden. He designed it so the garden rooms envelop the house. To walk the gardens is to circle the home.

Location: Northiam, Rye, East Sussex
Distance from London: Two hours southeast. (It’s 30 minutes from Sissinghurst.)
Season: March 25 to Oct. 30; 11A.M. to 5:30 P.M., except Mondays.
Best Time to Visit: Midsummer for blousy abundance. greatdixter.co.uk.

Avant-garde film director (Caravaggio, Edward II, Blue), artist, designer, and gay rights activist Derek Jarman succeeded in doing what no one else has seemingly done—at least in England. He created a garden in a desert landscape, on the shingle spit (picture a sandbar) of Dungeness on the coast of Kent that has formed over a thousand years. It’s flat, bleak, and barren, a stark contrast to the rolling green hills and farmland a few miles away. The assumption would be that it’s inhospitable. But Jarman tore up the gardening rule book and built his own best memorial on a small stretch of the beach against the severe backdrop of a nuclear power station.

If this all sounds less than attractive, let me say that Jarman’s garden is a refreshing and inspiring palate cleanser after the pleasing, regimented intensity of Sissinghurst and Great Dixter. Jarman made his garden “by accident,” after he bought a four-room fisherman’s house in 1986. (It would become his refuge after discovering that same year he was HIV positive; he died in 1994, at age 52.)

First using bits of driftwood and stones as outlines (on Dungeness there are no fences), he then began to work with native plants and also to experiment to see what else could survive the climate. Small armies of oxeye daisies, valerian California poppies, and sea kale nod their heads in the unforgiving sun and wind. He collected what washed up on shore—rope, metal, more driftwood—and larger stones to build sculptures and vary the focal point. For, he wrote in his journal, “my garden’s boundaries are the horizon.”

In the end, Jarman made a colorful, eccentric surround for his tar-black cottage—its doors and windows painted a striking gorse yellow to illuminate the structure against the gray ocean backdrop. The carcasses of fishing boats litter the landscape, a reminder of an industry practically extinct.

Jarman crafted the garden like he crafted his films. Both are rebellious, romantic, and inventive.

Location: Dungeness Road, Lydd, Kent
Distance from London: Two hours southeast. (It’s 40 minutes from Great Dixter.)
Season: The house is privately owned, but respectful visitors can tread carefully around the garden exterior.
Best Time to Visit: June and July for the bright skies and ideal light.

Beth Chatto is a British national treasure. Where gardening naysayers claimed it couldn’t be done, the plantswoman went ahead and did it anyway: In 1960 she began creating a series of idyllic gardens in a particularly tricky patch of British countryside, introducing differing plant species and horticultural methods in her radical gardening wake.

Chatto’s five widely varied gardens, in rural Essex, with its nutrient-deprived soil and less than 20 inches of rain a year, belie her exacting technique. Her advice—“the right plant for the right place”—should be heeded by all who garden with more passion than pragmatism. Her planting was informed by her late husband Andrew’s research into botanical origins. Chatto, who at 93 still oversees the gardens, was an experimenter, taking a deep interest in plant ecology. The Gravel Garden is a celebrated example. She used one of her parking lots, with its well-draining soil, to study which flowers were drought tolerant. Today, allium, iris, Oriental poppies, catmint, and sage stand bright, like well-irrigated flowers, not ones that have been reliant solely on Mother Nature for more than 20 years.

Other rooms to explore include the Water Garden, which, with its four ponds and lush green lawns, contrasts sharply with Gravel, while the Woodland Garden will put to shame those who think that gardening in shady spots is hopeless. The tearoom (for the fruit scones), gift shop (for notebooks), and plant nursery (for inspiration) are worth the time.

Location: Elmstead Market, Colchester, Essex
Distance from London: Ninety minutes northeast.
Season: March to October, Monday to Saturday, 9 A.M. to 5 P.M., Sundays, 10 A.M. to 5 P.M.; November to February, Monday to Saturday, 9 A.M. to 4 P.M., Sundays, 10 A.M. to 4 P.M.
Best Time to Visit: Spring and fall for the finest of the Gravel Garden. bethchatto.co.uk.

Rousham House & Garden is not visited for its flowers—although the double herbaceous borders are beautiful and plentiful as are some astonishing espaliered apple trees alongside a remarkable pigeon house and parterre garden. Rather, the main attraction is the breathtaking landscape, laid out by iconic designer, architect, and painter William Kent (1685–1748). The Gothic-style house, built in 1635 by Sir Robert Dormer and later remodeled by Kent, is still owned by the original family, and Kent’s body of work remains as he designed it in the 18th century. About 25 acres in size, it showcases his ability to blend the bucolic and the classical. At Rousham, his Arcadian fantasies are lived out in small temples, porticoes, and statuaries of Roman gods and mythical creatures.

Wear sneakers because you can’t see Rousham in a few short strides. Go early and wander deep into the parkland, through which a herd of longhorn cattle roam; Kent’s paths will lead you from ancient enclosed grottoes and pools to vast open spaces with seemingly infinite sight lines. On the Watery Walk, follow a long, slim stone channel as it curves slowly downhill under a canopy of beech and oak before opening onto a vista from which you can see the River Cherwell sleepily winding its way toward the Thames and the countryside of Oxfordshire far beyond.

To visit Rousham is also to take a trip back in time to the way English garden touring used to be. No children under 15 or dogs are allowed, and there are no tearooms or gift shops. (A public bathroom, however, was recently installed.) And instead of a pay kiosk, the current inhabitant, Charles Cottrell-Dormer, trusts you to pay for your visit via an honesty box.

Location: Bicester, Oxfordshire
Distance from London: Ninety minutes northwest.
Season: Year-round, 10 A.M. to 4:30 P.M.
Best Time to Visit: April, May, and June for peak green. rousham.org.