Gardening is one of the things Britain genuinely does better than almost anywhere. Around 87% of households have a garden of some sort, most of them small, and a remarkable proportion of the population takes their maintenance seriously.
The English garden style
Britain effectively invented two garden styles that spread worldwide.
The English landscape garden of the eighteenth century — associated above all with Capability Brown — swept away formal parterres in favour of an idealised natural landscape: rolling grass, serpentine lakes, clumps of trees, and a ha-ha instead of a wall so the view ran uninterrupted. Brown remodelled over 170 estates and shaped how the English countryside itself is imagined. Stowe, Blenheim and Petworth are the great examples.
The cottage garden came later and went the other way: dense, informal, romantic planting of roses, hollyhocks, delphiniums and foxgloves crowded together. Gertrude Jekyll and Vita Sackville-West at Sissinghurst refined it into the herbaceous border, and it remains the dominant British domestic style.
The Chelsea Flower Show
Held every May in the grounds of the Royal Hospital Chelsea, run by the Royal Horticultural Society, and the most prestigious flower show in the world. Designers build complete show gardens over three weeks that are dismantled within days, competing for gold medals and the Best in Show award.
It is covered extensively on television, attended by the Royal Family, and treated with a seriousness that puzzles outsiders. Gnomes were banned from the show for decades and the prohibition was lifted only in 2013, for one year, as a charity stunt.
The National Garden Scheme
One of the quietly lovely British institutions. Thousands of private gardens — many of them ordinary suburban back gardens — open to the public on set days each year, with a small entry fee and usually homemade cake, and the proceeds go to nursing and health charities.
The famous “Yellow Book” lists them all. The scheme has raised well over £70 million since 1927, and it is the best way to see how British people actually garden rather than how designers do.
The plants
The British climate is exceptionally good for gardening — mild, wet, with a long growing season and few extremes. Roses are the national favourite by a distance. Also central: delphiniums, lupins, sweet peas, dahlias, hydrangeas, clematis, and spring bulbs in enormous quantity.
The lawn is an English invention and remains an obsession for some, though the tide is turning — “No Mow May” and wildflower lawns have gained real traction as awareness of insect decline has grown.
Allotments
Where there is no garden, or not enough of it, there is the allotment — a rented plot on council land for growing vegetables. Waiting lists in cities run to years.
Gardens worth visiting
Sissinghurst in Kent, Great Dixter in Sussex, Hidcote in Gloucestershire, Stourhead in Wiltshire, Bodnant in Wales, the Lost Gardens of Heligan and the Eden Project in Cornwall, and Kew. Most are National Trust or RHS, and membership pays for itself quickly.