Top 10+ Bucket-List Gardens Worth Planning a Trip Around
Gardens are small reminders of the paradise this world once was—and could be again. They are teaching tools, respites, and escapes. No matter how advanced our technologies and societies become, there is nothing like a garden for bringing us back to earth. For me, any trip or staycation is incomplete without a visit to one. Luckily, most cities have them, and some of the most magnificent gardens are open to the public. Summer is peak time to explore the best gardens, so we’ve rounded up 10 of our favorites around the world. Each one would be the highlight of any trip.
1) Villa d'Este, Tivoli, Italy
Just a one-hour train ride from Rome, the Villa d’Este was the 16th-century home of Cardinal Ippolito II d’Este. As he built his estate he transported stones and statues from the remnants of a nearby villa that had been the summer home of the ancient Roman emperor Hadrian. The cardinal tapped Pirro Ligoria, an architect and classical scholar, to design the property’s palace and surrounding terraced gardens. A walk through these hillside gardens is a lesson in Italian Renaissance engineering, with hundreds of spouts and fountains, often in the form of grotesques, cascading down steps and through decorative canals before feeding into manmade pools. The views are magnificent, with the historic town of Tivoli visible in the distance through hedges, moss covered caves, and Roman pine trees.
2) Jardin Majorelle, Marrakech, Morocco
In the 1920s, the French artist Jacques Majorelle designed a two-acre garden in Marrakesh, Morocco, to capture his idea—call it a fantasy—of the look and feel of “the Orient.” Regardless of the fictive nature of his creation, there is still true beauty in his work. Most of the garden and villa are drenched in a striking shade of cobalt blue now called Majorelle, a color the artist picked up from the Tuareg people’s indigo-dyed garments. After Yves Saint-Laurent and Pierre Bergé bought the property in the 1980s, it became a destination for the world’s fashion and art elite. Now anyone can visit and enjoy the garden’s cacti and native flora, and the primary-hued villa, which now houses a collection of Berber artifacts.
