Eight glorious gardens have been shortlisted for the Historic Houses (HH) Garden of the Year Award 2025 and the public is now invited to vote. Showcasing independently owned gardens, parks and grounds, the awards is in its 41st year and is sponsored by Christie’s.
Among the shortlist is photogenic Hestercombe in Somerset (below), which boasts three centuries of landscape design, with its lakes, temples, combes and woodland, including Georgian and Victorian areas, plus Edwardian formal gardens created by Sir Edwin Lutyens and Gertrude Jekyll, with all the irises, pools and pergolas that entails.
Hestercombe.
Last year, Country Life featured Iford Manor Gardens in Wiltshire, home to the well-known landscape architect Harold Peto at the beginning of the 20th century, and it is highlighted again here. Exemplary restoration at Iford has been ongoing for 60 years by the Cartwright-Hignett family and visitors love its Mediterranean, Byzantine and Japanese influences, with statues, colonnades, rills and ponds on Georgian terraces.
Another imaginative restoration has taken place in the grounds of Gothic shell Lowther Castle in Cumbria, blending Neo-Gothic design with 17th-century formality, Victorian extravagance and one of the UK’s largest adventure playgrounds.
The gardens at Lowther Castle.
Raby Castle’s park and gardens, Co Durham, reopened last summer to much acclaim, after Lord and Lady Barnard commissioned award-winning designer Luciano Giubbilei to reimagine it; the result was ‘ingenious’, with historic brick walls and mature yews blending with mazes and a grass amphitheatre.
Hole Park, Kent.
‘This year’s shortlist shows the variety on show across England’s finest gardens,’ says HH director general Ben Cowell. ‘They range from the historic grandeur of Arundel Castle, West Sussex, to the bluebells and wildflower meadows of Hole Park, Kent… while at Penshurst Place, East Sussex, visitors can enjoy 11 acres of Elizabethan gardens… [and] Wollerton Old Hall, Shropshire, delights with intimate garden rooms and exquisite planting.’ Visit the Historic Houses website for further information and to vote.
Meanwhile, voting for the RHS Partner Garden of the Year opens on April 17. This much younger competition is in its fifth year and there are 231 to choose from, 15 of which are new for 2025. There will be regional as well as overall winners; last year’s victor was Green Island Gardens in Essex, which was lovingly created within woodland destroyed during the 1987 hurricane.
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