Gardening is joyful, healthy and inspiring. This is also known in England, the cradle of European garden culture, where some of the most beautiful English garden art is located on the coast. “Because there is always something to do, gardeners should have nine lives,” said writer Vita Sackville-West, and Jane Austen says that “one likes to get out into a shrubbery in fine weather.”
Northumberland
In 1755, at the age of six, Baron William Lorraine inherited Kirkharle Estate near Newcastle, where the later famous English landscape architect Lancelot Capability Brown had previously been born in 1716. Around 1770, Brown began to design Kirkharle Garden, planting belts of trees, creating a “serpentine lake” and cascades. Lancelot Brown changed the look of England in the 18th century by creating impressive picturesque park landscapes at many famous stately homes and had a significant influence on the development of English-style parks. His best-known garden art includes Hampton Court, Kew Gardens in London and Richmond Palace in Brunswick.
The “Versailles of the North”, Alnwick Castle, is the second largest inhabited noble residence after Windsor and has been the ancestral seat of the Percy family, Duke of Northumberland, for 700 years. The impressive park, also designed by Lancelot Brown, includes the “Poison Garden”, where highly poisonous and hallucinogenic plant species thrive and which, for safety reasons, may only be entered with a guide.
Kent
A frequent visitor to Goodnestone Park was novelist Jane Austen, who was inspired to write her best-loved novel Pride and Prejudice by the magnificent manor house, gardens and company during a double wedding. The beautifully landscaped terraced gardens are well worth seeing, as are the Walled Garden, the Herb Garden, the Rose Garden and the surrounding extensive parkland. And if you cannot get enough, you can even spend the night here.
In the 1930s, author couple Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson began to transform the garden of their estate Sissinghurst Castle into the now world-famous garden consisting of ten separate garden rooms, the “Gardens within a Garden”, including the White Garden, Rose Garden, the South Cottage Garden, the Lime and Moat Walk as well as the Nut and Herb Garden. Sackville-West loved the opulent, Nicolson on the other hand the formal. A historical, poetic retreat about which Vita Sackville-West wrote a whole series of books, with advice, columns and letters for garden lovers.
Sussex
Although the American-British writer Henry James (1843-1916), by his own account, had no green thumb: “I am hopeless about the garden, which I don’t know what to do with and shall never, never know – I am densely ignorant”, James loved the garden of his Lamb House in Rye, probably one of the prettiest little towns in England. James worked in his “Garden Room”, particularly enjoyed the daffodils in spring and was deeply honoured when the white Narcissus was named after him.
Located between Eastbourne and Brighton is Monk’s House, an 18th century cottage bought by Virginia Woolf in 1919 for “the shape, fertility and wildness of the garden”. Monk’s House was the meeting place of many famous writers. The family’s actual gardener was Virginia’s husband Leonard, who created a beautiful English country garden with incredible views of the Sussex Downs. The garden inspired Virginia Woolf and she had her writing room moved to have a better view. “Our orchard is the very place to sit and talk for hours.”
Hampshire
“One likes to get out into a shrubbery in fine weather”, says Jane Austen in her novel Mansfield Park. From 1809 until her death in 1817, the famous British writer lived in the magnificent country estate of Chawton House north of Portsmouth in southern England. Here she wrote, revised and published, amongst others, English literature classics such as Pride and Prejudice and Emma. The gardens have been restored in the style of English landscape gardens, with wildflowers and herbaceous borders, a walled garden with old rose varieties and a wide lawn, including a “Ha-Ha”, an invisible ditch that kept grazing animals away from the house without interfering with the view.
Isle of Wight
True Victorian pomp, on the other hand, can be found on the Isle of Wight off the coast of southern England. Osborne House, Queen Victoria’s former country residence, is surrounded by Victorian-Italian style gardens with terraces, pavilions and pergolas where clematis and camellias bloom, a walled garden where fruit trees flourish, including an orange tree and the legendary Osborne myrtle, with its delicate white flowers. Since the 1850s, myrtle has been the first choice for royal bridal bouquets from Queen Elizabeth II to Diana, Camilla, Kate Middleton and Meghan Markle.
Dorset
In 1840, British writer Thomas Hardy was born in Bockhampton near Dorchester in the county of Dorset. Around the thatch cottage built of clay and straw by his great-grandfather, there is a typical cottage garden with roses and lush flower borders, gravel paths and fruit trees. It was here, besides his early short stories and poems, that the novel Under the Greenwood Tree was written.
Cumbria
The oldest topiary in the world can be seen in Levens Hall Gardens in Cumbria. The four-hectare gardens were laid out around 1690 and are largely unchanged to this day. The highlight are the numerous trees and shrubs that were shaped into artistic forms, mostly yews, of which 25 have survived to this day. The unusual tree shapes depict “king and queen” chess pieces, Queen Elizabeth and her court ladies, a “judge’s wig” or the Howard lion. In 1695, a French gardener planted the first “Ha-Ha” in England at Levens Hall.
For more gardens on England’s coast, travel inspiration and the opportunity to create an individual itinerary, visit https://englandscoast.com/de/create-itinerary
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Notes to editors:
The England’s Coast project is delivered by the National Coastal Tourism Academy whose partners include: The Yorkshire Coast, Visit Scarborough, The North York Moors National Park Authority, Visit East Yorkshire, Visit Lancashire, Visit Cumbria, This is Durham, Visit Northumberland, Visit Essex, Visit Thanet, Dover/White Cliffs Country, Creative Coast Kent, Visit Brighton, Experience West Sussex, Visit Portsmouth, Discover Gosport, Visit Isle of Wight, Coast with the Most -Bournemouth/Christchurch/Poole, Somerset and Exmoor National Park – The Hinkley Tourism Action Partnership, P&O Ferries, Hornblower City Cruises Poole.
Image: Topiary in the garden at Levens Hall, Cumbria ©VisitBritain/Joe Wainwright