How to borrow from Britain’s greatest gardens – and recreate them at home

Christopher Lloyd’s bold, unruly garden at Great Dixter unfolds around the 15th-century timber-framed house - Carolyn Clarke

Britain has long thought of itself as a garden island – a green, slightly strange place set adrift in the Atlantic, where gardening has become both habit and identity. In difficult times (and of those there never seem to be few), gardens offer something steady – a kind of quiet reassurance.

But they are more than that. Every garden is an imprint: a set of decisions made in soil and plants. They tell us what was valued, how the world was understood, where people sought escape or control. To me, much like buildings or books, gardens are a form of history – revealing much about the lives that shaped them.

In my book, The Garden Through Time (available now), I set out to trace those ideas across centuries and continents, from grand landscapes like the gardens at Hampton Court Palace to smaller, deeply personal spaces such as Prospect Cottage on the salt and wind-battered south coast.

And, while you cannot recreate these gardens in full, you can borrow from them. The planting palette, clipped forms, a way of shaping space – small and not-so-difficult actions that invite something of their character into your own plot.

Here are three of Britain’s most enduring gardens, and how to echo them at home.

Sissinghurst

The Elizabethan Tower at Sissinghurst was home to Vita Sackville-West’s writing room - Alamy

From the top of the Elizabethan tower, Sissinghurst Castle Garden resolves into order: clipped hedges and straight paths forming axes that divide lawns and enclosed garden rooms.

From above, it is precise, almost architectural – a sequence of defined spaces. But at ground level, that clarity softens. The structure holds, while the planting shifts and spills, changing with the seasons.

Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson began work here in 1931, transforming a derelict Tudor site into one of Britain’s most influential gardens. The White Garden pares everything back to whites, silvers and greens. Elsewhere, the palette widens – Delos, for example, brings a dry, Mediterranean note to the Kent countryside.

Denied her inheritance of Knole under the laws of primogeniture, which saw her parents’ estate pass to the closest male relative, Vita was forced to make something of her own here.

Sissinghurst is formal, yes, but never stiff; ordered, but never lifeless. It takes the language of the great estates she was excluded from and reshapes it into something more personal, more her.

Sissinghurst is formal, but far from lifeless - Alamy

I was lucky enough to spend time gardening here a few years ago, under the tutelage of the head gardener, Troy Scott Smith, training wisteria and roses across the old stone walls.

What struck me then, as it does so many Sissinghurst devotees, is just how modern and alive the garden still feels, nearly a century on.

How to create Sissinghurst at home

White borders and displays, when done well, are not austere but luminous: a palette of whites, silvers and soft greens that holds its own through spring and summer. Combine long-flowering perennials such as anemone “Honorine Jobert” alongside silver foliage – artemisia or santolina work well  and soften the whole with climbers like jasmine or Rosa mulliganii, which famously smothers Sissinghurst’s central White Garden pavilion in scent.

Levens Hall

Levens Hall is home to the world’s oldest topiary garden, designed by Monsieur Guillaume Beaumont - Alamy

To visit Levens Hall is to step into something slightly surreal. The topiary garden here feels almost theatrical – a cast of clipped forms standing in quiet formation: spirals, domes, teetering cones, green chess pieces.

Created in the late 17th century, it is the oldest surviving topiary garden in the world. Its origins lie in the arrival of Guillaume Beaumont, a royal gardener displaced by the Glorious Revolution, who came north in the 1690s to work for Colonel James Grahme.

What makes it remarkable is its survival. The shapes have been clipped and guided, but never fundamentally altered. Over more than three centuries, only a handful of head gardeners have maintained the garden, allowing it to evolve rather than be redesigned.

To note, the current head gardener, Chris Crowder, will retire in 2026 after 40 years in the role. The result is something rare nowadays: continuity. The forms lean and swell with age, some precise, others intentionally wonky, but each tended with meticulous care.

These shapes invite interpretation. It’s no wonder they’ve acquired nicknames: Queen Elizabeth and her Maids of Honour, the Judge’s Wig, even Homer Simpson. These shapes feel almost animate and characterful, open to projection.

To walk here, then, is to move through something remarkably unchanged – a garden that has held its form but never lost its sense of play. High-camp, high-horticulture, and entirely unapologetic.

How to recreate Levens Hall at home

You don’t need acres to create a topiary garden. Yew, box, pittosporum or ilex all respond well to regular trimming, and even a couple of domes or cones in pots can introduce structure. Surround these shapes with grasses and loose perennials – verbena works well – to bring a lightness that offsets the solidity of clipped forms. As the season shifts, those forms come into their own. In late summer, when planting begins to fade and go to seed, they hold the garden together, providing structure. And in the dusk light, you might just catch them chattering or shifting slightly (or it might be the rosé).

Great Dixter

The overflowing patio pots of Great Dixter’s walled garden feature an assorted mix of annuals, succulents and perennials - Alamy

A garden of abundance and horticultural drama, Great Dixter is where colour riots across every surface and spills on to the paths, as if the beds themselves have burst their seams.

The garden unfolds around a 15th-century timber-framed house, reworked in the early 20th century by Edwin Lutyens for Nathaniel Lloyd. But it was his son, the great gardener Christopher Lloyd, who made Dixter what it is today.

Returning after the war, he took a garden rooted in Arts and Crafts tradition and pushed it somewhere bolder, looser, more his own.

This is not a neat garden. It is unruly, a kind of botanical bacchanal, where self-seeding fennel jostles with poppies, euphorbias and foxgloves. Plants spill, collide and compete. Lloyd loathed polite borders and distrusted pastels; his taste ran to the vivid, the assertive. Red against pink, yellow against orange – combinations that should jar, but here feel entirely deliberate.

And yet, it works. Because beneath the apparent chaos is meticulous control. Dixter is not wild, but carefully orchestrated – even down to the self-seeding plants allowed to self-seed. The whole continues to be perfectly maintained under long-standing head gardener Fergus Garrett and the gardening team.

How to recreate Great Dixter at home

The entrance to Great Dixter is always crowded with pots – something easily achieved at home, even in a small space. In summer, start with a structural backbone: something like a purple-flowering clematis (something like “Polish Spirit”) in a large container works well, trained up a simple hazel frame. Then, lean into heat and colour.  Marigolds (try “Cinnabar”, a Dixter favourite), dahlias and anything a little over the top will do the work. And don’t over-tidy. Let plants spill and lean into each other.

The Garden Through Time, by Thomas Rutter (Hachette, £20), brings 45 of history’s greatest gardens to life in rich storytelling and illustration. It is available to order now.

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