The Best Winter Gardens
Winter gardens are a specifically northern European genre, designed to provide colour, scent and structure between November and March when other gardens close down. The best combine evergreen architecture, coloured bark, winter-flowering shrubs and witch hazels, hellebores and snowdrops.
Anglesey Abbey Winter Walk, Cambridgeshire
Designed in the 1990s, with a half-mile walk planted with white-stemmed birches, coloured-stem cornus, witch hazels and bulbs — the British model for the modern winter garden.
Cambridge University Botanic Garden Winter Garden
Created 1979, considered the first formal winter garden in Britain and still the prototype.
Hillier Gardens Winter Garden, Hampshire
The Sir Harold Hillier Winter Garden, around 2 hectares with national collections of hamamelis and pinus.
Wakehurst Place, Sussex
Kew's country garden, with extensive witch hazel and winter bulb plantings; partly responsible for popularising the winter garden in the UK.
Bressingham Gardens, Norfolk
The winter garden created by Adrian Bloom is one of the most-visited winter gardens in Britain.
Westonbirt Arboretum
Famous for autumn but increasingly for winter: the silver birches and coloured cornus plantings work for both seasons.
Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge MA
American cemeteries often double as botanic gardens; Mount Auburn's witch hazel and evergreen plantings make it a notable winter destination.
Lan Su Chinese Garden, Portland
Chinese garden tradition emphasises winter colour; the deciduous trees, pines and water make this a particularly photogenic winter site.
Marwood Hill Gardens, Devon
Privately created plantsman's garden with one of the best winter walks in southern England.
Hauser & Wirth Somerset (Oudolf Field)
The naturalistic perennial planting holds its winter structure better than any conventional border — the standing seedheads of Oudolf's perennials are themselves the winter garden.
Explore on the map
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.