The Best Arts and Crafts Gardens
The Arts and Crafts garden, developed in England around the turn of the twentieth century, married firm architectural structure (typically by Edwin Lutyens) with painterly herbaceous planting (typically by Gertrude Jekyll). The result is the model that still defines what most people in the English-speaking world mean by a 'garden'.
Hidcote Manor Garden, Gloucestershire
Lawrence Johnston's masterpiece (1907-1948), the most influential Arts and Crafts garden after Sissinghurst. National Trust property.
Hestercombe, Somerset
The most complete Lutyens-Jekyll collaboration, with the Great Plat (Lutyens) and the Pergola Walk (Jekyll) preserved as designed.
Sissinghurst Castle Garden, Kent
The most famous and influential Arts and Crafts-derived garden, created by Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson from 1930.
Munstead Wood, Surrey
Gertrude Jekyll's own home and garden, the laboratory in which she developed her ideas on colour-graded borders.
Lindisfarne Castle, Northumberland
Lutyens converted the castle for Edward Hudson; Jekyll's tiny walled garden survives outside as one of her most intact original schemes.
Folly Farm, Berkshire
Lutyens's house and Jekyll's planting, generally cited as their most spatially inventive private collaboration.
Great Dixter, East Sussex
Originally a Lutyens commission for the Lloyd family, transformed into the experimental laboratory of Christopher Lloyd and now Fergus Garrett.
Mottisfont Abbey, Hampshire
Norah Lindsay's planting from the 1930s, now famous for the National Collection of pre-1900 shrub roses, is in the Arts and Crafts lineage.
Snowshill Manor, Gloucestershire
Charles Paget Wade's garden of 'rooms' from the 1920s and 1930s, made on the strict Cotswold Arts and Crafts principles.
Gravetye Manor, West Sussex
William Robinson's own garden — Robinson was Jekyll's mentor and the leading writer of the time on naturalistic perennial planting.
Plan your next trip
All of the gardens mentioned in this article are pinned on the interactive map. Use it to plan a route, group nearby sites into a single trip, or compare gardens by style and season.