The Most Beautiful Gardens, Parks and Forests in the United Kingdom
10 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful gardens, parks and forests in the United Kingdom are St Kilda, Stourhead and The Needles. The list covers 10 gardens, parks and forests. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Britain's great contribution to garden history is the eighteenth-century landscape garden, which abandoned straight lines for lakes, rolling lawns and temples placed as in a painting. The mild, damp climate later made the country a home for plants collected worldwide, giving rise to botanical gardens and arboreta of unusual richness. Outside the gates, chalk coasts, Atlantic islands and remnants of ancient woodland complete the picture.
Stourhead in Wiltshire is one of the purest landscape gardens, a circuit around a lake with a Pantheon and other classical buildings reflected in the water. Kew Gardens in London is a UNESCO-listed botanical garden whose Victorian Palm House still holds tropical plants, and the Eden Project in Cornwall grows rainforest and Mediterranean plants inside giant biomes built in a former clay pit. Sissinghurst in Kent, created by Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson, is known for its White Garden, and Bodnant in north Wales for its laburnum arch.
The natural places here are as distinctive. Westonbirt in Gloucestershire is a national arboretum famous for autumn colour. The Dark Hedges in Northern Ireland are an avenue of beech trees planted in the eighteenth century, now intertwined over the road. Wistman's Wood on Dartmoor is a stunted oak wood growing among moss-covered boulders. The Needles, chalk stacks off the Isle of Wight, rise from the sea, and the remote archipelago of St Kilda holds some of the highest sea cliffs in Britain and huge seabird colonies.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | St Kilda | Nature reserve | ✓ |
| 2 | Stourhead | Historic garden | |
| 3 | The Needles | Stack | |
| 4 | Eden Project | Botanical garden | |
| 5 | Dark Hedges | Remarkable tree | |
| 6 | Kew Gardens | Botanical garden | ✓ |
| 7 | Bodnant Garden | Arboretum | |
| 8 | Westonbirt Arboretum | Arboretum | |
| 9 | Sissinghurst Castle Garden | Historic garden | |
| 10 | Wistman's Wood | Forest |
01 St Kilda
United Kingdom57.815° N 8.588° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Hugh Venables · CC BY-SA 2.0 People lived here for at least two thousand years, and probably far longer: pottery found in 2015 points to Neolithic settlers. The islanders lived on seabirds, taken by men who climbed the cliffs and stacks, on a few sheep and cattle, and on barley and potatoes grown in Village Bay. Adult men met each morning in the street to decide the day's work, a gathering outsiders called the St Kilda parliament.
Did you know? In the 21 years before 1876 only 15 of 56 babies born on the islands survived, most of the others killed by neonatal tetanus.
02 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.
03 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.
04 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.
05 Dark Hedges
United Kingdom55.134° N 6.381° W
Image by Darkmoon_Art from Pixabay What makes the Dark Hedges remarkable is not any single tree but the way age has worked on all of them at once. These are old trees and they show it: limbs thrown out sideways at improbable angles, bark smoothed and folded like elephant hide, roots heaving out of the verges.
Did you know? The avenue gained a Tree Preservation Order in 2004, and a Dark Hedges Preservation Trust was set up in 2009 to look after it.
06 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.
07 Bodnant Garden
United Kingdom53.234° N 3.801° W
Image by fallonrw from Pixabay The story begins in 1874, when Henry Davis Pochin — an industrial chemist who had made his fortune with a process for whitening rosin used in soap, and later an MP — bought the estate. With the designer Edward Milner he reshaped the slopes around the Georgian house and planted North American and Asian conifers along the River Hiraethlyn to create a pinetum in the valley known as the Dell.
Did you know? The conifers of the Dell include Douglas firs, giant redwoods and Japanese umbrella pines planted in the Pochin era of the late nineteenth century.
08 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.
09 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.
10 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 the United Kingdom?
- On our list, St Kilda ranks first, followed by Stourhead and The Needles.
- When was St Kilda abandoned?
- The last inhabitants of St Kilda were evacuated at their own request in 1930. The archipelago is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site for both its natural and cultural value.
- What is an English landscape garden?
- An English landscape garden is an eighteenth-century style that replaced formal geometry with an idealised natural scene of lakes, lawns, woods and classical buildings. Stourhead and Stowe are among the best-known examples.
- Where are the Dark Hedges?
- The Dark Hedges are on Bregagh Road near Armoy in County Antrim, Northern Ireland. The beech avenue was planted by the Stuart family in the eighteenth century.
- How many gardens, parks and forests are on this list in the United Kingdom?
- The list covers 10 gardens, parks and forests.