Vote for your 2025 Garden of the Year
The Garden of the Year Award, sponsored by Christie's, recognises the importance of some of the country’s most spectacular gardens with outstanding horticultural and public appeal.
Voting for the 2025 Garden of the Year Award is open. Vote for your favourite garden below.
Read about the eight shortlisted gardens for this year’s award below.
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Read about the 2025 nominees
Arundel Castle Gardens, West Sussex
Set high on a hill, Arundel Castle commands the local Sussex landscape with magnificent views across the South Downs and the River Arun.
The extensive 38 acres of gardens and landscape provide visitors with beautiful floral displays throughout the spring, summer, and autumn months, with wonderful specimen trees within the landscape and an immense variety of plants throughout the gardens.
Hestercombe Gardens, Somerset
Hestercombe Gardens, located near Taunton, spans 50 acres of quintessential Somerset beauty and showcases four centuries of garden design. Visitors can explore the Georgian Landscape Garden from the 1750s, the Victorian Shrubbery, and the Edwardian Formal Gardens, crafted in the early 1900s by Sir Edwin Lutyens with planting schemes by Gertrude Jekyll, offering a rich and varied horticultural experience.
Through meticulous research and conservation efforts, Hestercombe Gardens Trust have brought back the gardens to their original splendour, blending historical accuracy with enduring beauty.
Hole Park, Kent
Hole Park is an extensive, private family garden of rich variety set in classic English parkland. Created after World War I in the style of an Edwardian gentleman’s garden, it has evolved into a wonderful blend of the formal and informal thanks to the dedicated vision and care of four generations of the Barham family. Standout features include extensive Yew topiary, herbaceous borders; sweeping lawns with fine specimen trees, ponds and pools, and a magnificent walled garden.
The gardens are centred around a beautiful Georgian house with spectacular views of the surrounding parkland and hills of the High Weald National Landscape.
Iford Manor Gardens, Wiltshire
Tucked away at the bottom of a tranquil valley, the garden at Iford is historic and has evolved over many generations of passionate private gardeners, most famously landscape architect Harold Peto who made Iford his home 1899-1933. He took a Georgian terraced garden and developed it further, building on Mediterranean as well as Japanese influences, with statues, colonnades, rills and ponds gracing the terraces.
By 2025, Iford will have been on a 60-year restoration journey, over two generations. Thought lost after the war, the structural recovery was undertaken by John and Elizabeth Cartwright-Hignett. William & Marianne Cartwright-Hignett encountered a new generation of challenges when they took over in 2016. They have recovered and restored many areas, extending and enhancing in the process.
Lowther Castle, Cumbria
When Lowther Castle & Gardens Trust recruited a garden designer to take on the sleeping beauty that the gardens then were, their brief was clear: the gardens should not be restored as such; instead, the gardens should see layers of the new and layers of the old side by side.
The resulting gardens at Lowther Castle are amazing. They take the formality of the seventeenth century, the pseudo romance of the neo-Gothic, the extravagance of the Victorian and Edwardian eras, and blow them all up - in consequence presenting ideas that are novel and striking and bold.
Penshurst Place and Gardens, Kent
The formal gardens at Penshurst Place have records dating to 1346, though their formal structure didn't begin to take form until the 1560's, when Henry Sidney divided the area into "rooms" to grow fruit trees.
Today the thriving formal Gardens are divided into eleven distinct rooms which cover a variety of styles including herbaceous borders, renaissance-inspired box hedging, water features, statues and patterns. Visitor highlights include the 100-metre long Peony Border which features four varieties of pink peony, the Union Flag Garden which uses a selection of roses and lavender to create the Union Flag, and the bright vivid colours found along Jubilee Walk.
Raby Castle, Park, and Gardens, Co Durham
When 12th Lord Barnard inherited Raby in 2016, he and Lady Barnard commissioned award-winning designer Luciano Giubbilei to join them on a journey of reimagination. The result opened in June 2024; a transformation & ingenious re-thinking of its distinctive spirit. Historic features from red-brick walls to mature yew hedges blend perfectly with new additions, a grass amphitheatre, mazes & graceful rill.
Described by the 4th Duchess in 1870 as “A never-failing delight”, the walled gardens have enchanted visitors for centuries. Evolving to embrace innovation, nurture an ever-increasing variety of plants, and respond to global changes, the most recent transformation sees the garden grow into the 21st century with a graceful, contemporary reimagining.
Wollerton Old Hall Garden, Shropshire
Designed by Lesley and John Jenkins, the garden is set around a Grade II* sixteenth century Hall and has developed into an important modern garden in the English Garden tradition with echoes of Arts and Crafts. Covering three acres, it consists of a series of 14 linked garden “rooms” filled with modern and often specialist plantings.
The carefully managed successional planting ensures that each season has its appeal to visitors. The early months of the year are awash with drifts of anemones, erythroniums, snowdrops, trilliums and hellebores and dotted with bursts of colour from scilla, corydalis, muscari and tulips. The summer months are filled with the scent of roses, delphiniums, dahlias and phlox.
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