The Most Beautiful Botanical Gardens in the World

10 places in 9 countries · updated 13 October 2026

1. 01 Rio de Janeiro Botanical Garden

   Jardim Botânico do Rio de Janeiro

   Brazil · 6.8 km from Rio de Janeiro22.968° S 43.224° W

   

   The garden began as a royal experiment. In 1808, soon after the Portuguese court fled Napoleon's armies and settled in Rio, the prince regent João, later King John VI, founded it as a place to acclimatise spices and other useful plants brought from the East Indies. It opened to the public in 1822, the year of Brazilian independence, and grew into one of the great tropical gardens of the world: around 140 hectares at the foot of the Corcovado, of which some 54 are cultivated, holding about 6,500 species, with the statue of Christ the Redeemer watching from the ridge above.

   Did you know? Albert Einstein toured the garden in May 1925, and Queen Elizabeth II walked its paths in November 1968.

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2. 02 Jardín de Cactus

   Jardín de Cactus de Lanzarote

   Spain · 13.7 km from Arrecife29.080° N 13.476° W

   

   The Jardín de Cactus fills a former quarry on the island of Lanzarote with a dense, sculptural landscape of spines, columns, globes and rosettes. Here the volcanic ash known as picón, or lapilli, was once dug out to spread over the island's fields, where it holds moisture in the soil; the artist César Manrique turned the abandoned hollow into a garden that opened in 1991, the last of the great works he created for his native island.

   Did you know? The entrance is marked by a green-painted metal cactus nearly eight metres tall, one of Manrique's signature sculptures.

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3. 03 Keukenhof

   Kingdom of the Netherlands · 13.6 km from Haarlem52.269° N 4.547° E

   

   For eight weeks each spring, a 32-hectare park near Lisse turns into one of the largest flower displays anywhere. Around seven million bulbs, planted by hand between October and early December by a team of about forty gardeners, come into bloom in succession from mid-March to mid-May, with the tulips usually at their peak around mid-April. The planting is composed like painting rather than arranged like a collection: rivers of a single colour run beneath old trees and along the edges of ponds, and beds are layered so that one variety takes over as another fades. Because the whole scheme is dug up and replanted every year, no two seasons look quite the same.

   Did you know? Each planting spot holds three bulbs stacked at different depths, so as the shallowest finishes after about three weeks the next layer takes over.

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4. 04 Majorelle Garden

   Morocco · 1.1 km from Marrakesh31.642° N 8.003° W

   

   Behind a plain wall in the Gueliz district of Marrakesh lies one of the most famous colours in the world. The painter Jacques Majorelle, who had settled in the city, began laying out a garden here in 1923 and spent close to forty years on it. In 1931 he added a studio designed by the architect Paul Sinoir, a cubist block that he painted in a deep, electric ultramarine taken from the tiles and textiles he saw around him in Morocco. Majorelle blue now bears his name, and against it the rest of the garden is set, the grey-green of cacti and the deep shade of greenery made all the more vivid by that saturated wall of colour.

   Did you know? Jacques Majorelle was the son of Louis Majorelle, a leading Art Nouveau furniture maker of Nancy, and grew up among his father's cabinetmakers and marquetry craftsmen.

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5. 05 Eden Project

   United Kingdom50.362° N 4.745° W

   

   At the bottom of a former china clay pit in Cornwall, a cluster of giant bubbles holds a tropical forest. The Eden Project's two covered biomes are chains of interlocking geodesic domes, built from a tubular steel frame and clad not in glass but in hexagonal cushions of ETFE, a light, UV-transparent plastic film inflated into pillows that insulate the interior. Seen from the rim of the pit, they look less like greenhouses than like a colony of soap bubbles that has settled in a quarry.

   Did you know? Glass was rejected for the domes as too heavy and dangerous; the ETFE cushions weigh far less, and the largest, at the top, are up to about 9 metres across.

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6. 06 Kew Gardens

   United Kingdom · 12.4 km from London51.479° N 0.294° W

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   Kew Gardens, in south-west London, holds what it describes as the largest and most diverse botanical and mycological collections in the world, spread over 132 hectares beside the Thames. It began in 1759 as an exotic garden for Augusta, Dowager Princess of Wales, grew under George III with the help of Sir Joseph Banks, and became the national botanic garden in 1840. It is run by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, a research institution whose herbarium, library of more than 750,000 volumes and seed bank support plant science worldwide. In the 19th century Kew raised the rubber seedlings that spread rubber cultivation beyond South America. In 2003 the gardens became a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

   Did you know? In 2022 Kew scientists described Victoria boliviana, a new species of giant waterlily that had been growing unrecognised in the gardens for more than 170 years.

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7. 07 Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden

   South Africa · 7.7 km from Cape Town33.987° S 18.433° E

   

   Kirstenbosch exists because Cecil Rhodes liked the view. He bought the land on the eastern slopes of Table Mountain in 1895 as part of his Groote Schuur estate, and when he died in 1902 he willed it to the state; the garden itself was founded in 1913 under its first director, Harold Pearson, who set it a strikingly narrow mission for the time — grow and display South Africa's own indigenous plants exclusively, with no imported showpieces from elsewhere in the world. That restriction made it one of the first botanical gardens anywhere organized around a single region's native flora rather than a global curiosity collection.

   Did you know? Surviving stretches of a wild almond hedge, planted in 1660 on Jan van Riebeeck's orders to mark the Dutch colony's frontier, still grow in the garden.

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8. 08 Nong Nooch Tropical Botanical Garden

   Thailand · 39.2 km from Rayong12.767° N 100.933° E

   

   Nong Nooch started in 1954 as a fruit plantation, bought by Pisit and Nongnooch Tansacha with no botanical ambitions at all. It was Nongnooch's travels that changed the plan: inspired by ornamental gardens she saw abroad, she replanted the estate as a flower and palm garden and opened it to the public in 1980. Her son Kampon took over management in 1983 and pushed the collection well past decorative planting into serious botanical territory.

   Did you know? The land Pisit and Nongnooch Tansacha bought in 1954 covered about 1,500 rai, roughly 240 hectares, intended for coconuts, mangoes and oranges.

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9. 09 Royal Greenhouses of Laeken

   Koninklijke Serres van Laken

   Belgium · 6.2 km from Brussels50.888° N 4.360° E

   

   The Royal Greenhouses of Laeken form a small city of glass in the grounds of the Belgian royal palace: domed pavilions, rotundas and long galleries that run between them like covered streets, together enclosing some two and a half hectares. Built almost entirely of iron and glass, they are among the most important 19th-century monuments in Belgium and still house the Royal Botanic Collection, with its camellias, orange trees and plants from Central Africa.

   Did you know? The octagonal Palm Pavilion was furnished as a bedroom and linked to the palace by an underground corridor, where Leopold II is said to have received his mistresses.

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10. 10 Lotusland

    United States · 6.5 km from Santa Barbara34.443° N 119.657° W

    

    Lotusland is a garden made by a performer's imagination. Ganna Walska, a Polish-born opera singer and socialite, bought this Montecito estate in 1941 and spent more than forty years turning it into a sequence of theatrical outdoor rooms: lawns crowded with hundreds of golden barrel cacti, paths edged with chunks of blue-green slag glass, a pond of sacred lotus, a topiary zoo and a horticultural clock. The 37-acre garden now holds some 3,500 kinds of plants.

    Did you know? In 1971 Ganna Walska auctioned 146 pieces of her jewellery and spent the proceeds on the rare cycads of what became her last garden.

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