10 of the most romantic gardens from the pages of House & Garden
I have visited hundreds of gardens over the past 25 years, and I think I could describe just a handful of them as truly ‘romantic’. For me, a romantic garden has a certain je ne sais quoi that you can’t quite put your finger on. It is usually about the atmosphere of the place, the feeling you get when you walk around.
In terms of plants it is certainly the rose that wins the prize for most romantic flower. Linked to Aphrodite, Greek goddess of love, and Venus, Roman goddess of beauty and desire, it has been associated with love and romance since ancient times. It is also a bloom that feels very English, although most are not native to our shores. I’d say that almost all the gardens I describe as romantic would have a rose or two in them, and most would be in England. Isabel and Julian Bannerman’s gardens are often described in this way - and their creations are full of roses and sometimes faux ruins. Their own garden in Somerset is certainly romantic, a sensory paradise with borders stuffed full of scented roses, lilac, tobacco plants and sweet Williams, and an old-fashioned orchard billowing with cow parsley.
But there are romantic gardens abroad too. A garden like Ninfa in Italy is deeply romantic to me, with its ruined buildings clad in climbing roses and a river running gently through like a scene from a fairytale. Interestingly, this is a garden created in the English style, very different to the formal topiary often associated with Italian gardens. I also describe the garden of Rohuna in Morocco as romantic - and this too has wild tangles of roses up on the hillside overlooking the sea - but it is as far from an English garden as you can get. Its creator, Umberto Pasti, tells the romantic story of how he fell asleep under an olive tree on the bare hillside 30 years ago and woke up knowing he had to make a garden there. So perhaps it is also about the stories behind each garden, and a sense of history and intrigue. Above all, I think romantic gardens should be immersive and sensory, places you can step into and be transported into another world.
Andrew Montgomery1/10When designers Isabel and Julian Bannerman move house, the world waits to see what they will do to the garden. Wasting no time, they impose their particular type of magic on whatever they inherit, transforming abandoned, overgrown and unloved spaces into flowery arcadias. In 2019, they moved to Ashington Manor in Somerset, where they have been restoring the Elizabethan house and conjuring a garden from almost nothing.
The garden contains various areas, including the romantic rose garden pictured here, a cottage garden, a working garden for vegetables and cut flowers, an orchard and more. 'It's all about abundance and generosity of colour and scent', says Isabel. Above, the new rose garden has metal arches clad in Rosa 'Mulliganin', with crimson R. ‘Charles de Mills’ and pink R. ‘Président de Sèze’ in the beds, set off by favourites such as Phlox paniculata 'David' and Thalictrum 'Splendide White'.
Eva Nemeth2/10This beautiful garden at Upper Sydling in Dorset was also designed with Isabel and Julian Bannerman's help, but the walled garden shown here is the creation of Alastair and Susanne Cooper, who moved here in 2005 to start an organic farm. Enclosed by brick and flint walls, this sheltered walled space is now a haven of high-quality horticulture, incorporating vegetable, cut flower and stock beds within a picture-perfect framework of herbaceous borders set around a central water feature. Box spheres create formal structure to anchor the flowery masses that by midsummer are barely contained within the framework of the beds. Huge mounds of roses, such as ‘Reine des Violettes’, ‘Ispahan’ and ‘La Ville de Bruxelles’, draw you in as you walk past, their perfume heavy in the air, while yet more roses clamber up arches and pergolas, and drape themselves luxuriantly over the surrounding walls.
Eva Nemeth3/10Deep in the Castelli Romani hills, 40 miles south of Rome, Torrecchia Vecchia is a place where nature and man have come together to make an extraordinary garden. Like the nearby Garden of Ninfa, it has been shaped around the ruins of a medieval village, giving it an air of romanticism and mystery only heightened by its magical setting in a landscape of untouched natural beauty. When it was bought by an Italian newspaper baron in the 1990s, his wife decided she would make a garden. Inspired by Ninfa, she wanted something soft and romantic, full of scented English roses that would clamber over the ruins.
Initially begun by the curator of Ninfa, and later taken over by Dan Pearson, the garden has gone from from neglected wilderness to romantic paradise. ‘The garden is always on the brink of being lost to nature,’ says Dan. ‘It should be difficult to tell where it starts and the woodland begins.’
Ngoc Minh Ngo4/10Umberto Pasti is so passionate about preserving the native flora of northern Morocco, he has created a garden on a stony hillside above the sea south of Tangier. ‘For hundreds of years, this was a charcoal-making area, so all the trees had disappeared, the hills were bare and the soil was baked,’ says Umberto. ‘People hadn’t given anything back to the soil, so we have had to transport hundreds of tons of topsoil and manure.’ Today, the garden is a paradise of shady trees, tangled greenery and jewel-like flowers that jostle together on terraces linked by meandering stone walls.
Rachel Warne5/10There's something particularly romantic about the idea of a hidden walled garden in the middle of the city. Ben Adler and his now late wife Pat Llewellyn fell for one of the finest houses on Fournier Street back in 2013, and turned to the young garden designer Miria Harris for help with the neglected garden. They wanted a romantic, timeless garden that could be filled with flowers, so Miria drew up a planting plan, orchestrated to do that for as much of the year as possible. ‘We started with extraordinary striped tulips followed by an explosion of peonies and wisteria. But I think the roses are what make it really special. Often first and last to flower is Rosa ‘Boscobel’ and we have masses more, including ‘Little White Pet’, ‘Gertrude Jekyll’, ‘American Pillar’ and ‘Cardinal de Richelieu’. They are chosen for fragrance and colour, which ranges from white and soft pink to deepest burgundy.’
Sabina Rüber6/10Thirty years after creating the timeless gardens at Shute House in Dorset, landscape architect Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe was tempted out of retirement to revitalise them for its new owners, in what would transpire to be his final project. Water is the keynote of the garden, with rills, canals, pools and waterfalls laid out in a complex and intricate design. The water cascades into octagonal, square and hexagonal pools, each one with a bubbling fountain in the centre. Here a formal lake, with black swans that follow the owner as she walks, contrasts with the informality of willow, fern and wisteria bordering the water. Each glassy surface acts as a mirror to the sky, so on still days you are not sure if what you are experiencing is real or a reflection in the water.
Sabina Ruber7/10Three generations of women have looked after the famously romantic gardens at Kiftsgate Court in the Cotswolds – without a plan ever being made on paper – but it all works with a happy rhythm of its own. Despite having no formal horticultural training, Heather Muir laid down the bones of the garden, best known for its timeless elegance, its superb collection of fragrant old-fashioned roses and, of course, the mythical mammoth rambler that bears the same name.
Anne Chambers, Heather’s granddaughter, manages Kiftsgate now and says that if her grandmother were to come back to the Cotswold garden today, just a few miles north of Chipping Campden, she would be able to recognise the layout and planting.
Dean Hearne8/10Working with designer Milan Hajsinek, Cordelia de Castellane has created a glorious garden at her country house in northern France, where the abundant borders provide beautiful flowers for her home as well as inspiration for her role as a creative director at Dior.
At the rear of the house, the garden is bisected by a long grassy walk with generous borders on either side. A cross-axis path creates a view across the garden over the box clouds to the fields beyond – and back towards the greenhouse. Old-fashioned David Austin roses in pinks, creams and apricots are punctuated by cones and mounds of clipped box and skirted by vibrant herbaceous perennials. ‘I wanted a very English look,’ says Cordelia. ‘My French-style garden is at the front, but my heart was set on an English flower garden at the back.’
Richard Bloom9/10Inspired by the Pre-Raphaelite artist Robert Bateman who once lived there, two designers have created an enchanting garden based around the remains of an Elizabethan manor at Biddulph Old Hall in Staffordshire.
Bateman’s circle of friends included Edward Burne-Jones, whose hallucinatory series of paintings entitled The Legend of the Briar Rose is based on the story of Sleeping Beauty. In the four pictures, young men and women seem drugged by the verdant beauty of the natural world, which threatens to ensnare and overwhelm them. Bateman and his wife Caroline created a garden within the ruins that rejected high-Victorian formality and embraced the wildness of the Briar Rose paintings. ‘We have taken our inspiration from the descriptions and sepia photographs that record this spectral garden,’ explains the owner.
Allan Pollok-Morris10/10In an extract from her book, 'Gardens in my Life', legendary garden designer Arabella Lennox-Boyd told the story of her family home and garden at the Palazzo Parisi in Oliveto, Lazio. When she took it on in later life, she was “finally able to put my mark on it, to soften it and make it feel more welcoming.” Here brick steps lead to the swimming pool through flower beds where Paeonia rockii seedlings and roses are planted amongst Lavandula angustifolia ‘Vera’, Caryopteris x clandonensis ‘Kew Blue’ and Ampelodesmos mauritanicus, creating a foreground to the view of the Sabine hills.
