A garden is an ideal place to spend a sunny afternoon, but would you fly across the world for the pleasure of doing so? Which gardens are worthy of such a journey? To answer that question — and define what makes a garden truly spectacular — we assembled a panel of six horticultural experts for the latest installment of our T25 series. Louis Benech is one of France’s best-known landscape designers, part of the team responsible for the much-praised 1990 overhaul of the Tuileries in Paris. In 2016, the Sussex, England-based garden designer Juliet Sargeant became the first Black woman to have a show garden at the Chelsea Flower Show, where she won a Royal Horticultural Society gold medal. Tim Richardson, who lives in London, writes about gardens for numerous publications and is the author of 22 books on the subject. Before founding Domino magazine and serving as T’s editor in chief from 2012 to 2016, Deborah Needleman spent many years as a garden editor at House & Garden. She also maintains an impressive plot at her home in upstate New York. The Japanese-born, New York-based architect and plant lover Toshiko Mori is an architecture professor at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, where she focuses on sustainability. And Tom Delavan is T’s design director, as well as an interior decorator and green thumb.
Clockwise from top left: the T contributing editor and the conversation’s moderator, Alexa Brazilian, with the panelists Deborah Needleman, Tim Richardson, Louis Benech, Juliet Sargeant, Tom Delavan and Toshiko Mori.
Each panelist was asked to nominate 10 must-see gardens and, on a video call in March, they spent almost four hours winnowing down that long list to a definitive 25. Most, if not all of them, are open to the public, with some requiring reservations or other advance planning. Only eight of the 51 finalists were suggested by more than one jurist, making for some lively debate: All agreed, for example, that the Dubai Miracle Garden, a flower-encrusted theme park that includes, among other spectacles, a nearly 60-foot-tall Mickey Mouse topiary, uses unconscionable amounts of water and includes no native plants. But Sargeant, who suggested its inclusion, pointed out the project’s mass appeal. Though it was ultimately crossed off, with one panelist deeming the place “deeply immoral” and another calling it “honestly disgusting,” all agreed that it raised important issues, earning it a mention here.
Gardens from 20 countries were nominated, with Italy and the United Kingdom coming out on top; each ended up with five on the final list, followed by France with four. Unsurprisingly, the panel was particularly interested in the differences among the styles favored by various cultures, from meticulously groomed Asian stroll gardens to more naturalistic English cottage borders. The impact of colonialism on landscape design was also a topic of discussion, as was the focus on native plants in several African, South American and Australian projects. A few gardens were disqualified for practical reasons: The owners of one eccentric, privately owned sculpture garden in Britain, for example, asked to be left off the list for fear of overcrowding. Others, like Claude Monet’s Giverny in France, were deemed too obvious or too packed with tourists to wholeheartedly recommend. Ultimately, while the jurists have all traveled extensively, visiting gardens around the world, none of them had seen, or even heard of, every nomination. In some instances, they had to defer to their fellow experts and take a leap of faith — something that, as gardeners, they’re well accustomed to doing. A garden, said the British horticulturist Gertrude Jekyll (1843-1932), who designed one of the gardens in our top 25, “teaches entire trust.” — Alexa Brazilian
This conversation has been edited and condensed. Though numbered, the entries below aren’t ranked; the gardens appear roughly in the order in which they were discussed.
