From the dew-soaked borders of an English country garden to the raked gravel of a Kyoto temple, the world’s great gardening traditions share one magnificent conviction: that to grow things well, and beautifully, is among the finest things a person can do
A Word Before We Begin: Why Gardens Matter More Than Ever
There are moments, standing in a garden at its absolute peak — when the roses are just, precisely, perfectly open; when the air carries that particular cocktail of warm earth, crushed herb, and cut grass that lodges permanently in memory; when every planting decision made over months of planning suddenly coheres into something that feels, against all probability, inevitable — when it becomes impossible to argue that gardens are anything less than one of humanity’s greatest achievements.
We believe this, rather passionately, here. And we suspect you do too.
The garden has been with us since the very beginning of recorded civilisation. Before the cathedral, before the concert hall, before the gallery — the garden. The oldest literary work in human history, the Epic of Gilgamesh, contains a garden. The earliest Egyptian wall paintings, nearly four thousand years old, depict formal pools edged with papyrus and lotus. The Persian paradise garden — the pairidaeza, from which our very word paradise descends — was being planted with cypress and fruit trees and murmuring water channels while the Greeks were still composing their first philosophical dialogues. Wherever human beings have found the resources and the inclination, they have made gardens. And wherever they have made them, those gardens have told us something true about who they were: what they believed about nature, what they found beautiful, what they thought life was for.
This is a collection about exactly that: the extraordinary diversity of garden traditions that human cultures have developed across the world, across the centuries. It is a celebration of horticulture in its fullest and most various expression — not just the flowers (though the flowers are magnificent, and we will give them the space they deserve), but the ideas behind them; the plants chosen and why; the design thinking; the craftsmanship of clipping and training and staking; the seasonal rhythms that govern each tradition; and the sheer, inexhaustible creativity that gardeners everywhere bring to the endlessly challenging, endlessly rewarding task of growing things beautifully.
We travel, in these pages, from the rose-crammed borders of the English cottage garden to the breathtaking hydraulic theatrics of the Italian Renaissance villa; from the philosophically exacting gravel gardens of Zen Japan to the brilliantly coloured mass plantings of the Dutch bulb fields; from the ecologically sophisticated native plant landscapes of contemporary Australia to the shade-giving, water-centred paradise gardens of the Islamic world. In each tradition we find excellence — particular, specific, technically brilliant excellence — and in each we find something that illuminates not just that culture’s relationship with plants but our own.
Because ultimately, whatever the tradition, whatever the latitude, whatever the prevailing philosophy, every great garden is made by someone who cared — about the soil, about the plants, about the light at this particular hour in this particular season. That caring, and the beauty it produces, is what unites all gardeners everywhere. It is also, we think, what makes gardening the most reliably wonderful subject in the world.
Let us begin.
The United Kingdom: The Nation That Invented Itself in a Garden
It would be easy — and not entirely unfair — to describe Britain as a nation that has collectively decided gardening is a matter of national importance. The evidence is compelling. We hold the finest horticultural show in the world each May in the grounds of the Royal Hospital in Chelsea, drawing exhibitors who work for years in anticipation of a single week’s display and visitors who plan their diaries around it twelve months in advance. We have some 27 million gardens, tended with varying degrees of skill and uniformly fierce devotion. Our newspapers carry gardening columns. Our radio broadcasts gardening programmes. Our nurseries, seed merchants, and plant breeders are the envy of the world. And our garden traditions — the formal, the informal, the wildly exuberant, the meticulously restrained — have been shaping international horticultural taste for the better part of four centuries.
The formal garden tradition reaches its British roots deep into the Tudor period, when knot gardens — intricate interlaced patterns of low clipped hedging, typically box (Buxus sempervirens) or hyssop, sometimes thyme, the spaces between filled with coloured gravels, sand, or contrasting plantings — were considered the height of horticultural sophistication. These were gardens designed to be read as well as walked: their patterns were most fully appreciated from the raised walks or upper windows of the house, and their complexity was a direct expression of the owner’s cultural attainment. The inspiration was partly Italian and Flemish, filtered through the pattern books and herbal literature circulating in Elizabethan England, and partly homegrown — a native love of intricacy and symbolic ornament that expressed itself simultaneously in embroidery, masonry, and planting.
Topiary, equally, was a Tudor passion that has never entirely left us. The great topiary gardens of Britain — Levens Hall in Cumbria, with its extraordinary collection of peacocks, pyramids, and fantastical shapes in yew (Taxus baccata) and box that date to the late seventeenth century; Hever Castle in Kent; the magnificent formal gardens at Hidcote in Gloucestershire, where Lawrence Johnston’s hedged garden rooms created a template for the twentieth century — demonstrate a commitment to the craft of clipping that requires patience, skill, and a particular kind of long-term thinking quite different from the seasonal rhythms that govern most gardening. A topiary specimen of any ambition takes decades to reach its intended form. To clip it well is to understand it — its growth habits, its response to light and moisture, the way it thickens from the cut.
The eighteenth century’s great landscape movement — the rolling, seemingly natural parkland style associated above all with Lancelot “Capability” Brown, who remodelled something approaching two hundred estates across his extraordinarily prolific career — swept away many of these formal gardens in the name of a more naturalistic ideal, inspired by landscape painting and the picturesque philosophy. Brown’s great parks at Blenheim, Chatsworth, Stowe, Petworth, and elsewhere replaced parterres and allées with sweeping turf, serpentine lakes (achieved by damming streams or excavating clay to create apparently natural water features), and carefully massed tree planting of oak (Quercus robur), beech (Fagus sylvatica), lime (Tilia × europaea), and sweet chestnut (Castanea sativa). The effect — and it remains a magnificent effect, visible in the British countryside to this day — was of a landscape that had always been exactly as it appeared: gently pastoral, softly atmospheric, deeply English.
It was Gertrude Jekyll, working mostly in the decades around the turn of the twentieth century, who synthesised the traditions and gave the English garden its modern identity. Jekyll had trained as a painter before failing eyesight drove her increasingly toward the garden, and the difference this made to her planting is everywhere apparent. Her colour borders — long herbaceous plantings that moved through carefully sequenced colour progressions, from cool blues and silvers through warm yellows and apricots to hot reds and oranges at the centre, then back through warm to cool — were exercises in applied colour theory of a rigour and sophistication that no previous gardener had brought to planting composition. She worked with the architect Edwin Lutyens on some of her most celebrated gardens, their partnership producing that most English of combinations: strong architectural bones (Lutyens’s stone paths, walls, steps, pergolas) softened and enriched by Jekyll’s exuberant plantings that always looked artless and always repaid the closest horticultural analysis.
Jekyll’s plant palette repays particular attention for what it tells us about the English garden’s characteristic preferences. She loved roses — particularly the old shrub roses, the gallicas, damasks, and albas, whose once-flowering but supremely fragrant blooms she combined with clematis, campanulas, and delphiniums in her famous June borders. She loved silvery-leaved plants — Stachys byzantina (lamb’s ears), Artemisia species, Senecio cineraria — for their light-reflective quality in the border and their ability to separate potentially clashing colours. She loved the great spiky verticals — delphiniums (Delphinium elatum cultivars), foxgloves (Digitalis purpurea), lupins (Lupinus polyphyllus) — for what she called their “noble” contribution to the border’s structure. And she loved the soft, blowsy abundance of asters, phlox, heleniums, and hemerocallis for the late season fullness they brought to a planting that might otherwise have exhausted itself by August.
The contemporary British garden scene is rich, contested, and genuinely exciting. The influence of Dutch plantsman Piet Oudolf — whose naturalistic perennial and grass plantings have transformed public spaces internationally — has been powerful, encouraging a move toward self-sustaining, ecologically rich planting that celebrates the full seasonal arc rather than peaking in June and collapsing gracefully thereafter. Amsonia hubrichtii, whose fine-textured foliage turns brilliantly yellow in autumn; Molinia caerulea ‘Transparent’, whose flower stems catch and hold late light; Sanguisorba tenuifolia and its many elegant cultivars; the great tribe of tall late-season composites — Rudbeckia, Echinacea, Helianthus — these plants, once considered unglamorous, are now the currency of the most forward-looking British planting design.
At Chelsea, the annual showcase that most fully reflects the state and direction of British garden ambition, the conversations around planting have shifted decisively toward ecological intelligence, seasonal longevity, and design that looks as good in February as in June. The show gardens that win gold medals in the current era are overwhelmingly those that demonstrate this kind of thinking: rich in structural planting, thoughtful in their use of annuals and bulbs to extend seasonal interest, and honest about the beauty of the garden in transition — the spent seedhead as beautiful as the flower that preceded it, the frosted grass stem as worthy of attention as the midsummer bloom.
Japan: The Finest Horticulture in the World
This is not a claim made lightly. Japanese horticulture, considered as a whole — the breeding, the training, the cultivation, the aesthetic philosophy that governs the selection and placement of every plant — represents a tradition of technical mastery and aesthetic depth that is, by any measure, extraordinary. To visit Japan’s great gardens with attention to the plants themselves, rather than simply the compositions they create, is to receive a horticultural education available nowhere else.
Begin with the pines. Japanese garden design has, over centuries, developed the art of pine cultivation into something that belongs as much to sculpture as to horticulture. The black pine (Pinus thunbergii) and red pine (Pinus densiflora) are the species most commonly used, their naturally irregular growth habits exaggerated and intensified through decades of patient training and annual needle work — the process of removing old needles by hand to control the density and direction of growth. A mature pine in a great Japanese garden may have been worked on by skilled gardeners for a century or more, each year’s intervention building incrementally on those that preceded it. The resulting forms — horizontal layers of foliage balanced over a gnarled, dramatically exposed trunk — are among the most beautiful things in horticulture, and they are impossible to rush or replicate without the investment of exactly that time.
The moss gardens of Japan deserve particular mention for the technical virtuosity they represent. Saihō-ji, the “moss temple” west of Kyoto, is carpeted with some 120 different moss species (Bryophyta) that together create a surface of extraordinary visual complexity — deep green, yellow-green, silvery-green, emerald — under the shade of maples and cedars whose canopy creates the cool, moist microclimate that moss requires. Managing a moss garden is a form of horticultural practice quite different from any other: it requires constant attention to moisture levels, light penetration, the removal of fallen leaves before they smother the living carpet, and the propagation of species that become patchy or fail. It is, by any ordinary measure, immensely labour-intensive work, and it produces an effect of such serene, luminous beauty that it stops visitors in their tracks.
Cherry blossom — sakura — is perhaps the most internationally recognised symbol of Japanese garden culture, and it merits more serious horticultural attention than it typically receives. The Japanese have been breeding ornamental cherries for over a thousand years, and the range of cultivars available represents one of the great achievements of empirical plant breeding. Prunus ‘Shirotae’, with its pure white, semi-double flowers and strongly horizontal branching habit; ‘Ukon’, whose flowers open a distinctive pale greenish-yellow that is unique in the cherry world; ‘Kiku-shidare-zakura’, with its weeping branches draped in densely double, deep pink flowers; ‘Taihaku’, the great white cherry, believed lost to cultivation until a single tree was discovered in an English garden in 1932 by Collingwood “Cherry” Ingram and returned to Japan — these are cultivars worth knowing individually, not simply appreciating collectively as “cherry blossom.”
The Zen dry garden — karesansui — is, from a horticultural standpoint, almost paradoxically minimal: the most celebrated examples contain no flowering plants whatsoever, their entire composition consisting of raked gravel or sand and carefully placed rocks. But to describe them as unhorticultural would be entirely wrong. The raked gravel requires constant, expert maintenance to retain its precise patterning. The rocks themselves were selected with the same care brought to choosing a precious specimen plant — transported at enormous expense, positioned according to principles that Japanese garden theory had refined over centuries, and managed (the moss that colonises their surfaces is encouraged in some places, discouraged in others) with ongoing attention. And the wall that encloses the garden at Ryōan-ji — that extraordinary aged clay surface whose warm ochres and rusts have become inseparable from the composition it contains — is itself a living thing, its colour and texture the product of centuries of weathering, algae, and moss growth managed or accommodated by those responsible for the garden’s conservation.
Autumn in Japan is, for many serious gardeners, the real horticultural revelation — equal to or surpassing the celebrated spring in the quality of its display. The Japanese maple, Acer palmatum, and its many cultivars, bred and selected over centuries for the intensity and duration of their autumn colour, perform across this season in ways that no other deciduous tree approaches. ‘Osakazuki’ is considered by many to be the finest of all for autumn colour — its leaves turning a brilliant, almost luminous crimson that holds for two weeks or more before falling. ‘Sango-kaku’, the coral bark maple, combines good yellow-orange autumn colour with the bonus of coral-red young stems that light up the winter garden. ‘Dissectum Atropurpureum’, with its finely cut, deeply purple-red foliage from spring through autumn and its weeping, mushroom-headed form, is one of the most architectural of all small garden plants anywhere in the world.
France: The Grand Art of the Formal Garden
French garden design at its greatest is an act of horticultural haute couture — technically demanding, visually spectacular, dependent on skills and resources that few can command, and producing results of a grandeur that stops the breath. It is also, in its finest expressions, an act of extraordinary horticultural precision: the clipped, shaped, trained plants that define the French formal tradition represent some of the most technically accomplished cultivation in the world.
Topiary and pleaching — the training of trees into flat, hedge-like forms on a raised framework — are central to this tradition and demand an understanding of plant growth that goes well beyond simple clipping. The pleached lime avenue is the classic French formal device: Tilia platyphyllos or Tilia × europaea trained onto horizontal wires at a set height, their lateral branches woven together to create a continuous aerial hedge on bare trunks, the effect formal and architectural in summer but revealing a beautifully complex winter tracery of branch and twig once the leaves have fallen. Done well — and the French do it very well indeed — a pleached avenue is one of the most satisfying sights in the designed landscape. Done poorly, it is a source of sustained horticultural disappointment.
The parterre de broderie, the defining planting element of the French formal garden in its seventeenth-century golden age, is a form of cultivated topography — a three-dimensional ground-level pattern created from clipped box (Buxus sempervirens ‘Suffruticosa’, the dwarf edging box, is the traditional choice) set against backgrounds of coloured gravel, crushed brick, sand, or low-growing planting. The patterns — scrolling foliage, formal fleur-de-lis, complex arabesques — were drawn from the decorative arts vocabulary of the period, and maintaining them requires annual clipping at precisely the right time (late summer, after the main growth flush has hardened) and a rigorous programme of soil nutrition that keeps the box growing vigorously enough to repair winter damage without producing the excessive soft growth that leads to winter die-back.
Box blight — Cylindrocladium buxicola and Pseudonectria buxi — has become one of the great horticultural crises of formal garden management across Europe, destroying the box topiary and hedging that represents centuries of investment in many of France’s most important gardens. The search for alternatives — Ilex crenata (Japanese holly), Pittosporum tobira, Euonymus japonicus, Taxus (yew) for larger elements, Teucrium chamaedrys for edging — is one of the most active areas of current horticultural research and experiment in the formal garden tradition. The results so far are promising: Ilex crenata in particular grows with a density and tolerance for clipping that makes it a credible box substitute, though its leaf shape and surface quality are distinct and require some aesthetic adjustment.
The rose garden — roseraie — is another area in which French horticulture has made a contribution of lasting international significance. The Empress Joséphine’s collection at Malmaison, assembled in the early nineteenth century and numbering some 250 species and cultivars, was one of the first great systematic rose collections and provided the subject matter for Pierre-Joseph Redouté’s incomparable botanical illustrations, still the most beautiful rose portraits ever made. The Roseraie du Val-de-Marne at L’Haÿ-les-Roses, founded in 1894 by Jules Gravereaux, holds one of the largest and most historically important rose collections in the world, with thousands of cultivars representing every class and period of rose breeding. To visit in June, when the old roses — the gallicas, damasks, albas, centifolias, mosses — are at their peak, is to experience something that has no horticultural equivalent: an intensity of fragrance, colour, and historical association that is simply overwhelming.
Italy: Water, Stone, and the Art of Growing in Grandeur
The Italian garden tradition has produced some of the most dramatic and technically ambitious horticultural achievements in European history, and the plants that inhabit these gardens — selected over centuries for their capacity to withstand the heat of the Italian summer, to contribute to compositions of architectural scale, and to maintain their dignity in landscapes designed for impressive effect — are as interesting as the designs they populate.
The Italian cypress (Cupressus sempervirens ‘Stricta’) is the plant most immediately associated with the Italian garden, and with good reason: its columnar form, deep blue-green colour, and capacity to reach fifteen metres or more while maintaining a spread of less than a metre make it the perfect vertical punctuation mark for a tradition that prizes axial formality and strong skyline silhouettes. A double avenue of mature Italian cypresses — such as those at Villa Gamberaia in Settignano, or lining the approach to countless Tuscan villas — creates an architectural effect of extraordinary power: the dark verticals framing and emphasising the perspective toward the villa, the canopy overhead filtering the harsh midday light, the resinous, slightly medicinal fragrance filling the air in summer heat.
The clipped ilex, or holm oak (Quercus ilex), is equally central — trained into hedges, tunnels, and the walls of outdoor rooms with a density and depth that no other evergreen can match at this scale. Ilex hedging at Italian villas is often centuries old, its internal woody structure massively developed while its outer surface is maintained by annual or biannual clipping into flat planes or curved forms. The sound of a light breeze in an ilex hedge — a dry, papery rustling quite different from the sound of any other plant — is one of the atmospheric details that stays with visitors to Italian gardens long after more spectacular impressions have faded.
Water — its management, its movement, its sound, its light-catching and heat-moderating properties — is the great technical achievement of the Italian Renaissance garden, and it was made possible by hydraulic engineering of considerable sophistication. The water chain (catena d’acqua) at Villa Lante at Bagnaia, completed in the 1570s to designs attributed to Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola, is one of the supreme achievements of landscape hydraulics: a carved stone channel down which water descends from the upper garden to the lower, its central spine elaborated into a continuous sculptural element whose crayfish forms reference the heraldry of the garden’s patron, Cardinal Gambara. The water moves through this channel with a speed and sound precisely calculated to produce a particular acoustic effect — neither the rush of a fast cascade nor the stillness of a formal pool, but something between, a continuous, regular sound that underlies the experience of the garden in all its other moods.
The planting in the great Italian formal gardens has historically been dominated by evergreen structure — the cypresses, ilexes, bay laurels (Laurus nobilis), and rosemary (Salvia rosmarinus) that maintain the garden’s architectural quality year-round, with seasonal flowering plants contributing colour in pots and urns rather than integrated borders. The lemon (Citrus limon) in its terracotta pot is the quintessential ornamental plant of the Italian formal garden: brought out from the limonaia (the glasshouse in which citrus overwintered) in late spring, positioned at strategic points around the garden to contribute fragrance and the glint of fruit, returned indoors before the first frosts of autumn. The limonaia — often a substantial stone building with large south-facing windows — is a garden building type unique to the Italian tradition, a piece of architecture generated entirely by the horticultural requirements of a plant that cannot survive the Italian winter outdoors but is too important to the garden’s character to sacrifice.
The Netherlands: The Flower as Art Form
In no garden tradition is the individual flower more seriously and expertly attended to than in the Dutch. This is a culture that, in the seventeenth century, traded houses for tulip bulbs and commissioned oil paintings of flower arrangements with the reverence more commonly given to portraits of the powerful — and it is a culture that has, in the subsequent four hundred years, built on that foundation a global expertise in flower growing, breeding, and display that remains without equal.
The tulip — Tulipa — is where any account of Dutch horticulture must begin, though it cannot end there. The species tulips from which all modern cultivars descend arrived in Europe from the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century, their exotic beauty immediately captivating to eyes accustomed to the relatively sober flower palette of medieval Europe. The Dutch hybridisers who worked with them over subsequent generations produced, through patient selection and a great deal of luck (the prized “broken” tulips — streaked and feathered with contrasting colours — were later understood to be infected with a mosaic virus), a range of forms and colours of extraordinary diversity. The Darwin Hybrid tulips that now dominate spring bedding — Tulipa ‘Apeldoorn’ and its relatives, with their large, bowl-shaped flowers on tall strong stems — are a twentieth-century development. The single late tulips, the parrot tulips with their fringed and twisted petals, the viridiflora tulips with their green flames on coloured backgrounds, the lily-flowered tulips whose pointed, reflexed petals give them a grace that the brasher double forms lack — each of these has been the product of sustained, expert selective breeding carried out by Dutch bulb growers who understood their crop with the intimacy of craftspeople who have spent generations on a single material.
Keukenhof, the bulb garden near Lisse that opens each spring for eight weeks, is the most spectacular public demonstration of Dutch bulb expertise — and it rewards more careful horticultural attention than the average visitor brings to it. The scale is, of course, immediately and somewhat staggeringly apparent: seven million or more bulbs planted each autumn, covering thirty-two hectares with bloom that extends from the early species crocuses and dwarf irises of March through the main tulip peak of late April into the late tulips and alliums of May. But within that spectacle, the horticultural decisions are sophisticated and instructive. The colour management across the large-scale beds — the way warm yellows and apricots are kept spatially separated from cool pinks and purples, with white used as a buffer between temperature-clashing tones — reflects an understanding of colour in the landscape that is difficult to acquire without working at this scale. The sequencing of flowering varieties across the season, ensuring that as one cultivar passes its peak another takes up the display, requires detailed phenological knowledge — the understanding of exactly when, under what temperature and light conditions, each cultivar will flower — that represents decades of accumulated practical expertise.
Beyond Keukenhof, the bulb fields of the Bollenstreek region — particularly along the corridor between Haarlem and Leiden, where flat polderland stretches to the horizon in spring-coloured stripes of red, yellow, pink, purple, and white — are one of the great horticultural spectacles of the world, though one created entirely for commercial rather than aesthetic purposes. The cut and bulb production industry that maintains these fields is one of the most economically significant agricultural sectors in the Netherlands, and the scale of operation — hyacinths, daffodils, and tulips grown in the millions of tonnes for export across the world — is extraordinary.
China: The Scholar’s Art of the Living Landscape
Chinese horticultural tradition is one of the oldest and most varied in the world, and it has contributed to global plant collections more than any other single national tradition. The plant hunters who explored China from the seventeenth century onward — the Jesuit missionaries, the British and French collectors of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the extraordinary E.H. Wilson who collected for the Veitch nurseries and later the Arnold Arboretum, and whose introductions to Western cultivation include Lilium regale, Rosa moyesii, Acer griseum, and hundreds of other plants now considered indispensable — were mining a botanical richness that the country’s extraordinary climatic and topographic diversity had accumulated over millions of years.
The classical garden tradition, as expressed in the surviving scholar gardens of Suzhou, deploys a very specific plant palette selected for its horticultural, aesthetic, and symbolic qualities — often all three simultaneously. The lotus (Nelumbo nucifera) growing in the garden’s central pond is not merely beautiful (though its flowers, ranging from pure white through pink to deep rose, and its extraordinary architectural seedheads, are indeed magnificent): it carries Buddhist associations of purity and spiritual aspiration, rising unstained from the muddy water below. The bamboo (in numerous Phyllostachys and Fargesia species) planted against a white-washed wall is appreciated for its shadow play in raking light, its sound in the wind, its associations in classical poetry with resilience and uprightness of character, and its practical value as a fast-growing screen. The flowering plum (Prunus mume) is prized for blooming in late winter, often in snow — its flower a symbol of perseverance and hope at the darkest point of the year.
The chrysanthemum, Chrysanthemum × morifolium — another Chinese plant of ancient garden cultivation, brought into cultivation at least three thousand years ago — deserves particular attention in any account of Chinese horticultural achievement. The range of forms developed by centuries of Chinese breeding is astonishing in its variety: spider chrysanthemums with long, reflexed petals that curl at their tips; anemone-centred forms with flat outer florets and a dense central cushion; incurved forms in which every petal curves inward to create a perfect sphere; pompon forms no bigger than a golf ball; and exhibition forms whose blooms are individually trained and disbudded to reach a diameter of thirty centimetres or more. The chrysanthemum show, staged each autumn throughout China, is a tradition of considerable antiquity and continuing popular devotion — a moment when horticultural virtuosity is celebrated publicly with the same enthusiasm that other cultures reserve for music or sport.
The United States: The New World’s Great Garden Experiment
American garden culture has, across a relatively short historical period, developed with a velocity and an openness to new ideas that reflects the country’s broader cultural character — energetically pluralistic, willing to discard tradition when it no longer serves, and capable of producing individuals of genuine original genius.
The American public park movement of the nineteenth century, led above all by Frederick Law Olmsted, established the principle — genuinely radical at the time — that carefully designed landscape should be available to all citizens regardless of social class or economic position. Olmsted’s vision was essentially horticultural as well as social: he understood, with the conviction of an evangelical, that the restorative power of the natural landscape — its capacity to relieve the nervous overstimulation of urban industrial life — was available through designed landscape as much as wilderness, if the design was sufficiently sophisticated and the plant material sufficiently excellent. His great parks — Central Park and Prospect Park in New York, the Emerald Necklace in Boston, the park systems of Buffalo, Chicago, and other American cities — were planted with the same attention to seasonal display, textural variety, and long-term development that the best private gardens of the period commanded.
The native plant movement in American gardening — the growing preference for species indigenous to North America over the European garden plants that had dominated domestic horticulture since colonial settlement — has become one of the most significant horticultural trends of the past three decades, driven partly by ecological conviction and partly by the genuine discovery that American natives are exceptionally beautiful garden plants. The work of designers like Piet Oudolf at the High Line and Lurie Garden, and of plantspeople like Larry Weaner, Roy Diblik, and Neil Diboll in the Midwest, has demonstrated that plantings based primarily on North American natives can be as visually spectacular, as seasonally rich, and as horticulturally satisfying as any European-derived planting tradition.
The plants themselves merit celebration. Rudbeckia fulgida ‘Goldsturm’ — the black-eyed Susan that remains, decades after its introduction to cultivation, one of the most reliable and beautiful of all late-season perennials, its chrome-yellow daisies with dark central cones flowering from July until October. Echinacea purpurea in its many cultivars — the traditional purple-pink form; ‘Magnus’, selected for its flat-petalled, non-reflexing flowers; the extraordinary ‘White Swan’; and the more recent complex hybrids in orange, red, and deep rose. Baptisia australis — false indigo — whose deep blue-purple flower spikes in May are followed by inflated black seedpods that rattle through autumn and winter. The prairie grasses — Sorghastrum nutans (Indian grass), Schizachyrium scoparium (little bluestem, whose foliage turns a magnificent blue-purple in autumn), Panicum virgatum (switchgrass) in all its cultivated forms — whose transparent, light-filled quality from late summer onwards is unlike anything that European grasses offer.
Australia: Growing Brilliantly Against the Odds
Australian garden culture has, over the past fifty years, undergone one of the most dramatic reorientations in the history of any national gardening tradition — a shift from the European-derived gardens that settler culture maintained at considerable resource cost to an ecologically grounded, climate-responsive tradition of genuine horticultural originality. This shift has been driven partly by necessity: the prolonged droughts, water restrictions, and extreme temperatures that affect much of the continent make European-style gardening not merely demanding but, in many areas, increasingly untenable. But it has also been driven by the growing recognition that Australian native plants are, simply, extraordinarily beautiful — and that the horticultural tradition that makes the most of them is one of the most interesting in the world.
The banksia — that extraordinary genus of some 170 species, all endemic to Australia, named for the botanist Joseph Banks who collected the first specimens during Captain Cook’s first voyage of 1770 — is as good a place as any to begin appreciating the horticultural wealth of the Australian native plant palette. Banksia serrata, the saw banksia, with its gnarled, fire-scarred trunk and large, cylindrical flower spikes in silver-grey and gold; Banksia coccinea, the scarlet banksia of Western Australia, whose extraordinary crimson and grey flower cones are among the most dramatically beautiful in the genus; Banksia spinulosa ‘Honey Pots’, compact enough for small gardens, its golden-orange cones reliably produced over many months — these plants offer not just single-season flower interest but year-round architectural quality, winter seedhead structures of genuine beauty, and ecological value, as major nectar sources for honeyeaters and habitat for a range of other fauna, that no European garden plant can approach.
The grevillea, with over 350 species and a seemingly endless range of cultivated forms, is equally remarkable for its diversity and its garden value. Grevillea ‘Robyn Gordon’, bred from a cross between G. banksii and G. bipinnatifida, produces its unusual spider-flower blooms — intricate clusters of red and orange that give the flower its common name — over virtually the entire year, one of the longest flowering seasons of any shrub in cultivation anywhere. Grevillea ‘Moonlight’, a tall screening shrub with creamy-white flowers; Grevillea lanigera ‘Mt Tamboritha’, a reliable low grower covered in small pink-and-cream flowers that suit the front of a mixed border; the prostrate forms used as vigorous, weed-suppressing ground covers in harsh conditions — the genus offers something for virtually every garden situation.
Water consciousness is now inseparable from serious Australian garden design, and it has produced a technical sophistication around irrigation management, soil water retention, and plant selection for drought tolerance that is increasingly relevant to gardeners across the world as climate patterns shift. Deep mulching — typically with local, native-derived materials that do not alter soil pH in ways that challenge plants evolved for specific conditions — reduces surface evaporation and moderates soil temperature fluctuations. Efficient drip irrigation systems, properly designed and managed, can reduce water use in established gardens by 50 percent or more compared with sprinkler irrigation. The selection of plants with deep root systems, capable of accessing subsoil moisture during dry periods, is as important a design criterion in many Australian gardens as flower colour or seasonal interest.
India: The Lush Complexity of the Tropical Garden
Indian garden tradition encompasses a range of climatic conditions — from the cool highlands of Kashmir to the monsoon-driven tropics of Kerala; from the semi-arid Deccan plateau to the humid Bengal delta — and a correspondingly enormous range of horticultural possibilities. To speak of Indian gardening as a single tradition is therefore immediately misleading. It is more accurate to speak of several overlapping traditions, each shaped by its climate, its cultural context, and its access to specific plant material.
The Mughal garden tradition represents the most formally sophisticated strand, bringing to the hot, dry climate of northern India the Persian paradise garden idiom with extraordinary technical skill. The water management systems of the great Mughal gardens — the complex networks of channels, cascades, and fountains at Shalimar Bagh in Lahore and Kashmir, at Nishat Bagh, at the gardens of Agra and Delhi — were engineering achievements of the first order, moving water from distant rivers and reservoirs through carefully graded channels to emerge, apparently effortlessly, in the garden’s central pools and fountains. The planting traditionally combined the sensory — fragrant roses (Rosa damascena and its relatives; the Rosa ‘Mogul’ group), flowering jasmine (Jasminum sambac, the Indian jasmine whose small white flowers are among the most intensely fragrant of any plant), and citrus — with the structural: chinar (Platanus orientalis, the Oriental plane tree), cypress, and fruit trees including mango, pomegranate, and fig.
The tropical gardens of Kerala and coastal Karnataka deserve separate attention for the extraordinary richness of their plant material. Plumeria — frangipani — whose waxy, intensely fragrant flowers in white, yellow, and pink are inseparable from the atmosphere of South Indian and South-East Asian gardens; Quisqualis indica, the Rangoon creeper, whose flower clusters open white, mature to pink, and then deepen to red, all three colours simultaneously visible on the plant; Bougainvillea in its many glorious cultivars; the towering Spathodea campanulata, African tulip tree, whose scarlet flowers open from water-containing buds; Heliconia in all its extraordinary tropical extravagance — these are the plants of a garden tradition with access to some of the world’s most dramatically beautiful ornamental material, and the best Indian tropical gardens deploy them with colour confidence and botanical knowledge that the best European cottage gardener would immediately recognise and respect as their own, in a different key.
The Islamic Garden: Abundance Made Sacred
The paradise garden of the Islamic tradition is, philosophically, the most clearly intentional garden form in world history: its purpose is explicitly stated, its programme precisely derived from the Quranic vision of paradise (Jannah), and its design vocabulary — the quadripartite chahar bagh plan, the central pool or fountain, the water channels representing the four rivers of paradise, the enclosed and protected space — has remained recognisably consistent across fourteen centuries and the extraordinary geographic range from Spain to India to Central Asia.
What this means in horticultural terms is a tradition built around specific plant associations: the fragrant rose (Rosa damascena, Rosa × alba, Rosa gallica, and their relatives — varieties selected above all for scent rather than visual display, in a tradition that prioritises fragrance in the garden with an intensity that few other horticultural cultures have matched); sweet-scented herbs, particularly myrtle (Myrtus communis, whose small white flowers and aromatic foliage are inseparable from the Islamic garden throughout its geographic range), basil, and mint; flowering fruit trees — pomegranate (Punica granatum), quince (Cydonia oblonga), almond (Prunus dulcis), apricot (Prunus armeniaca) — whose blossom provides spring colour and whose fruit provides both beauty and abundance; and the shade trees — plane (Platanus orientalis), cypress (Cupressus sempervirens), and the oleander (Nerium oleander), whose glossy evergreen foliage and long summer flowering in white, pink, or red make it one of the most useful and most beautiful shrubs for warm, dry climates.
The Alhambra gardens in Granada — the Nasrid palace complex that represents the Western pinnacle of Islamic garden design — demonstrate all of these principles in conditions of preserved historical authenticity unusual for any medieval garden. The Generalife, the summer palace above the main palace complex, preserves the linear water channel (acequia) along which seasonal planting is arranged, traditionally of roses and myrtle; the Patio de los Arrayanes, named for its myrtle hedges (arrayanes is the Spanish corruption of the Arabic al-rayhān, meaning aromatic plant), centres its composition on a long, still pool of such elegant simplicity that it has been reproduced in whole or in part by garden designers worldwide. The sound of water — which the Islamic garden tradition uses as an acoustic as well as a visual element, carefully modulating the volume of flow to produce a background murmur that cools the air psychologically as well as physically — is present throughout the Alhambra complex: in the Patio de los Leones, where twelve marble lions support the famous fountain; in the Generalife’s acequia; in the garden terraces that ascend the hillside above. It is, in the warmth of a Andalusian July, the most persuasive possible argument for the garden as paradise.
Scandinavia: The Full-Year Garden
The Scandinavian garden tradition is, to borrow a horticultural term, extraordinarily well-hardened: it has been developed by gardeners working under some of the most challenging conditions in the temperate world, and the plant knowledge that has accumulated in response to those conditions is of the highest quality. To garden in southern Sweden or central Norway is to think about hardiness with a precision that gardeners in milder climates never need to develop; to choose plants for their winter silhouette as carefully as their summer flower; and to understand that the twelve-month garden — one that offers genuine beauty in every season, not just from May to October — is not merely an aspiration but a necessity.
The ornamental grass is the plant that has transformed Scandinavian garden design most significantly over the past quarter-century, and its influence from this tradition has radiated outward to affect planting design internationally. Molinia caerulea subsp. arundinacea ‘Karl Foerster’, the purple moor grass cultivar whose upright flower stems catch and hold every breath of wind and every photon of low autumn and winter light; Calamagrostis × acutiflora ‘Karl Foerster’ (a different plant entirely, confusingly, despite the shared cultivar name — a feather reed grass with strictly upright, architectural form that holds its structure through winter in a way that few perennials match); Panicum virgatum ‘Shenandoah’, whose summer foliage is touched with red that deepens through autumn into a full garnet; Pennisetum alopecuroides ‘Hameln’, compact and reliable for its fox-tail flower heads from August — these grasses and their relatives are now central to the best Scandinavian planting, providing the structural continuity across seasons that allows the garden to remain interesting and beautiful throughout the long, dark months.
Spring bulbs are cultivated with particular intensity in Scandinavian gardens, partly because the eagerness with which they emerge in March and April — pushing through the last of the snow, flowering in late frosts with an insouciance that feels almost aggressive after a long winter — makes them emotionally disproportionate in their impact. Eranthis hyemalis, the winter aconite, naturalised under deciduous trees to create a carpet of chrome-yellow in February; Galanthus nivalis and its many named forms; the early Narcissus cultivars like ‘February Gold’ and ‘Tête-à-Tête’; the Siberian squill (Scilla siberica), whose brilliant gentian-blue flowers are intensified by the low spring light — these are plants that any gardener appreciates, but that the Scandinavian gardener, emerging from five months of grey and cold, loves with an intensity that borders on the devotional.
A Final Word: To Garden Is to Hope
Every garden described in these pages — from the most precisely raked Zen temple garden to the most exuberantly planted cottage border, from the most architecturally formal French parterre to the most ecologically sophisticated Australian native landscape — was made by someone who believed that tomorrow would be better than today. That the seed planted now would germinate. That the bulb tucked in in October would flower in April. That the tree staked as a sapling would shade the garden in thirty years. That the thing being made was worth making.
This is the central fact about gardeners, everywhere and in every tradition: they are, constitutionally and by nature, optimists. They work with living material in full knowledge of its volatility — that the weather may ruin the roses in a weekend, that the frost may catch the tender planting, that disease and drought and the wrong combination of soil and site may defeat even the best-laid plans. They know all this and they plant anyway, because the experience of a garden in full flower — in that moment of which we spoke at the beginning, when everything comes together and the whole is suddenly, miraculously more than the sum of its parts — is worth every difficulty and disappointment and failed experiment that preceded it.
This shared optimism is, we believe, what connects the Japanese monk tending his mosses at Saihō-ji, the Dutch bulb grower loading trucks in the pre-dawn dark at Lisse, the RHS gold medal winner trimming the last leaf on a Chelsea show garden at midnight, and the allotment holder in a northern English town who has just got her sweet peas up the canes in time. They are all doing the same thing: making something beautiful, in the full knowledge that beauty is fragile and impermanent, and in the absolute conviction that it is worth it.
It is worth it. It always has been.
Grow well.