The Most Beautiful Gardens, Parks and Forests in England
7 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful gardens, parks and forests in England are Stourhead, The Needles and Eden Project. The list covers 7 gardens, parks and forests. Last updated 13 October 2026.
England's gardens grew out of a mild, damp climate and a long passion for plants. Almost anything from temperate regions of the world will grow here, and from the eighteenth century English landowners invented a new kind of garden: the landscape garden, with lakes, lawns and groves arranged to look natural rather than geometric. Later, plant hunters brought back species from across the globe, and botanical institutions turned collecting into science.
Stourhead in Wiltshire is one of the finest landscape gardens, created by the banker Henry Hoare II around a lake ringed by classical temples, a grotto and a Palladian bridge. Kew Gardens in London, founded in 1759, holds one of the largest collections of living plants in the world, with its Victorian Palm House of iron and glass. Westonbirt, the national arboretum in Gloucestershire, began in 1829 with the Holford family and is famous for its maples.
Sissinghurst Castle Garden in Kent was made by Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson from 1930 as a series of outdoor rooms, including the celebrated White Garden. The Eden Project in Cornwall fills a former china clay pit with great geodesic biomes holding rainforest and Mediterranean plants. Wistman's Wood on Dartmoor is the opposite of all this design: a remnant of ancient oak woodland, its stunted trees growing among granite boulders covered in moss and lichen.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Stourhead | Historic garden | |
| 2 | The Needles | Stack | |
| 3 | Eden Project | Botanical garden | |
| 4 | Kew Gardens | Botanical garden | ✓ |
| 5 | Westonbirt Arboretum | Arboretum | |
| 6 | Sissinghurst Castle Garden | Historic garden | |
| 7 | Wistman's Wood | Forest |
01 Stourhead
United Kingdom · 31 km from Bath51.106° N 2.318° W
Image by Sabse713 from Pixabay The buildings are placed like figures in a picture. The Temple of Flora, from the 1740s, was the first. Across the water stands the domed Pantheon by Henry Flitcroft, built in 1753–54, the focal point of the whole garden and the view everyone remembers: its white portico mirrored in the lake, framed by trees.
Did you know? St Peter's Pump, a medieval pump house re-erected in the grounds, marks Six Wells Bottom, long regarded as the source of the River Stour.
02 The Needles
United Kingdom · 29.6 km from Southampton50.663° N 1.589° W
Image by JStephenArts from Pixabay Their shape owes much to the earth movements of the Alpine mountain-building period, which folded the chalk beds here until they stood almost on end. That near-vertical layering is why the stacks break away as thin, upright slabs rather than rounded lumps. There used to be a fourth: a slender pillar, said to have been around 120 feet tall and known as Lot's Wife, which fell during a storm in 1764.
Did you know? The lighthouse was designed by the engineer James Walker for Trinity House and cost £20,000, a substantial sum in the 1850s.
03 Eden Project
United Kingdom50.362° N 4.745° W
Jürgen Matern · CC BY-SA 2.5 The pit had been worked for clay for more than 160 years and was close to exhausted by the mid-1990s; in 1981 it had even stood in for the surface of the planet Magrathea in the BBC's television version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The idea of turning it into a showcase of the world's plants came from Tim Smit and Jonathan Ball in 1996.
Did you know? Inside the Core stands Seed, a 70-tonne egg carved by Peter Randall-Page from a single block of Bodmin Moor granite and patterned on plant-growth geometry.
04 Kew Gardens
United Kingdom · 12.4 km from London51.479° N 0.294° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by RichardMc from Pixabay The great glasshouses are the heart of any visit. The Palm House, built between 1844 and 1848 by the architect Decimus Burton and the ironmaster Richard Turner, is considered the world's most important surviving Victorian glass-and-iron structure. A gallery 9 m up lets you walk among the tops of the palms. The Temperate House, also by Burton, has twice the floor area and is the largest Victorian glasshouse still standing.
Did you know? In February 1913 the suffragettes Olive Wharry and Lilian Lenton burned down the gardens' tea house during a campaign of arson attacks in London.
05 Westonbirt Arboretum
United Kingdom · 26.2 km from Bath51.606° N 2.224° W
Image by ebor from Pixabay Today the arboretum spreads across about 600 acres with some 17 miles of paths. Around 15,000 specimens represent roughly 2,500 different kinds of tree and shrub from temperate regions all over the world, and five national tree collections are held here. The site falls into two contrasting halves. The Old Arboretum is the designed Victorian landscape of avenues, glades and specimen trees, many dating back to the 1850s.
Did you know? Blue labels mark Westonbirt's champion trees, the tallest or largest of their kind in Britain; there were 79 of them in 2011.
06 Sissinghurst Castle Garden
United Kingdom51.116° N 0.582° E
Hans Bernhard ( Schnobby ) · CC BY-SA 3.0 The buildings are older than the garden by four centuries. In the 1530s Sir John Baker, a Privy Councillor of Henry VIII, built the brick gatehouse range, and in the 1560s his son Richard raised a vast courtyard house entered through the four-storey tower, where he received Elizabeth I in 1573. The family's fortunes collapsed after the Civil War.
Did you know? Some 200 rose varieties were grown here, including 'Souvenir du Docteur Jamain', which had vanished from commerce until Sackville-West dug one up at an old nursery.
07 Wistman's Wood
United Kingdom · 26.3 km from Plymouth50.583° N 3.959° W
alex jane from london, uk · CC BY-SA 2.0 5 hectares, split into a North, Middle and South Grove on a sheltered south-west-facing slope of boulders, known locally as clatter. Its trees are mostly pedunculate oak, with a little rowan, holly, hawthorn, hazel and willow. Because limbs lie almost flat, humus gathers on them and plants that normally grow on the ground take root in the branches; polypody fern and bilberry are the most common of these.
Did you know? According to one tradition, the wood was planted by Isabella de Fortibus, Countess of Devon, who lived from 1237 to 1293.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful gardens, parks and forests in England?
- On our list, Stourhead ranks first, followed by The Needles and Eden Project.
- What is an English landscape garden?
- A style that appeared in eighteenth-century England in place of formal geometric gardens. It uses lakes, rolling lawns, clumps of trees and scattered buildings to create an idealised natural scene, as at Stourhead.
- Who created the garden at Sissinghurst?
- The writer Vita Sackville-West and her husband, the diplomat Harold Nicolson, who bought the ruined castle in 1930. He planned the structure of hedges and walls; she filled it with planting.
- What was the Eden Project site before?
- It was a worked-out china clay quarry near St Austell in Cornwall. The pit was reshaped and its domed biomes opened to the public in 2001.
- How many gardens, parks and forests are on this list in England?
- The list covers 7 gardens, parks and forests.