Britain's most beloved private gardens, revealed

Key findings at a glance

The Full rankings: Britain's most-loved gardens

Each garden is ranked by a combination of its Google review rating and the total number of reviews received, a pairing that reflects both the quality of the visitor experience and the breadth of engagement the garden sustains over time. Only gardens with a complete data set were included.

The top five: A closer look

The five gardens that lead our ranking share more than high scores. Each offers something that the best domestic gardens also aspire to: a sense of sequence and arrival; outdoor spaces that feel purposefully designed rather than incidentally arranged; and planting that rewards attention across every season.

Regional breakdown: Where are Britain's best gardens?

England dominates the overall ranking, accounting for 30 of the 35 gardens in the study. But the distribution within England is telling. Rural settings outperform urban ones across almost every metric: the top four gardens in the ranking are all set within country house estates, where space, planting maturity and the relationship between building and landscape have had decades, in some cases centuries, to settle.

Somerset emerges as a quietly exceptional county. The Bath Priory, Babington House, Durslade Farmhouse at Hauser and Wirth, The Newt and Grace and Savour at Hampton Manor all feature in the study, and between them they represent almost every register of the contemporary garden experience, from fine dining kitchen gardens to wild, arts-led landscapes. For sheer concentration of considered outdoor spaces, Somerset is hard to match.

London performs strongly on review volume but more modestly on rating. The Goring, Ham Yard Hotel, 11 Cadogan Gardens and Number Sixteen all draw significant visitor numbers, and the city's rooftop gardens, private squares and townhouse terraces represent a distinct and underappreciated category of garden design. Space is constrained, but intention is high.

Scotland's two entries, Glenapp Castle in Ayrshire and The Fife Arms in Aberdeenshire, both rank in the upper half of the study. Glenapp in particular, with its 4.8 rating from 760 reviews, demonstrates that remote, estate-set gardens with exceptional horticultural character can generate visitor loyalty that rivals far larger properties.

Wales is represented by Bodysgallen Hall in Conwy, a National Trust-owned hotel whose formal terraced gardens and walled kitchen garden have earned a 4.5 rating from nearly a thousand reviews. It is one of the more understated entries in the study and one of the most deserving of wider attention.

Gardens to watch: THE PIG-in the Cotwolds

THE PIG-in the Cotswolds is the newest spot on the list, opening on 8 September 2024 in Barnsley, near Cirencester. Set in a beautiful 17th-century country house, it blends the brand’s laid-back feel with impressive Arts and Crafts-style gardens designed by Rosemary Verey, making it a real draw for visitors who appreciate both good food and lovely outdoor spaces. As a newer addition, it already stands out for its character, setting and garden appeal, and looks well placed to become even more popular as more people discover it.

The Garden as an outdoor room: How to recreate what the great gardens get right

The qualities that make Britain's best gardens so compelling need not be the preserve of grand estates. They are design principles, ways of thinking about outdoor space that can be applied at any scale.

We have spent years observing how exceptional gardens work: how furniture and hard landscaping anchor a space, how seating positions shape movement and flow, and how the right materials create a sense of continuity between inside and out. The gardens that score most highly in our study are the ones where outdoor living feels genuinely settled, where the furniture, the surfaces and the planting all work together, rather than each existing in isolation.

While most homeowners focus their improvement budgets on bedrooms, kitchens, and living rooms, creating an outdoor space you truly love can be just as rewarding — and far more affordable. With the average home renovation costing £21,440 in 2024, a garden makeover typically comes in at just £5,000–£10,000, meaning you can transform one of a home's most cherished spaces for a fraction of the price.

Creating outdoor rooms that work

The garden room concept, as demonstrated so brilliantly at Hidcote and Sissinghurst, translates directly to domestic gardens of any size. Defining separate zones for dining, relaxing and moving through the garden gives a space its sense of intention. In gardens where space allows for only one such zone, a well-chosen casual dining set does double duty: it anchors a terrace as a place to eat, but equally as a place to simply be, to sit with a coffee on a slow morning, relax after a meal, or spend an afternoon in good company without needing to go anywhere else. Even in a smaller garden, a terrace with a well-placed dining set and soft enclosure of planting creates a quiet sense of retreat, somewhere to slow down, settle in, and enjoy time with others.

Choosing furniture that belongs in the landscape

One quality shared by every garden in our top twenty is that nothing feels out of place. Materials weather naturally. Colours sit quietly within the planting. Shapes relate to the architecture and terracing around them. This is the principle that guides our approach to outdoor furniture design, pieces that feel considered within a landscape rather than placed upon it.

Our conversation sets are designed around exactly this thinking: generous in proportion, refined in form, and built from materials that respond well to the British climate over many seasons. They create the kind of outdoor space you find yourself gravitating towards on a warm evening, or over a slow weekend lunch, the kind of space that the best gardens do so well.

Rethinking outdoor dining: the casual dining set

Of all the moments that define great garden experiences, and our data makes this clear, it is the act of sitting down that people remember most. The long lunch. The evening with friends that stretches past dusk. The quiet morning coffee on a terrace with a good view.

A well-chosen casual dining set is not simply a practical piece of garden furniture. It is the anchor around which outdoor life organises itself. The gardens that score most highly in our ranking all contain spaces where dining and gathering happen naturally. Creating that same quality at home is, in many respects, a simpler task than it might appear, it requires intention, good materials and furniture that has been designed with outdoor living genuinely in mind.

The gardens that score most highly in our ranking all contain spaces where dining and gathering happen naturally. With gardens like The Newt in Somerset, it is around the table that the garden experience reaches its fullest expression: where the produce of the kitchen garden arrives on the plate, where the setting and the meal become inseparable, and where the memories of a visit are made. Creating that same quality at home may be a simpler task than it might appear. It requires intention, good materials and furniture that has been genuinely designed for outdoor living, but the principle is the same: a well-considered dining space in the garden is not just somewhere to eat. It is somewhere to mark an occasion, linger over a long afternoon, and bring the best of the garden to the table.

Our casual dining collections are built around that purpose. Each is developed to feel purposeful within a landscape, designed to age gracefully, and proportioned for the kind of comfortable, unhurried outdoor life that the best British gardens make feel so natural.