The Most Beautiful Historic Gardens To Visit Around the World
Photo: © funkyfood London - Paul Williams/Alamy1/16Villa d’Este, Tivoli, Italy
In 1550, after a failed bid for the papacy, Cardinal Ippolito II d’Este was given the governorship of Tivoli. He set about building a villa and gardens for himself that would equal any in Rome. The steep, terraced landscape is filled with grottoes, sculpture, and statuary, but the dominant feature is water, which d’Este’s architects channelled into burbling canals, ponds, and a multitude of fountains.
© imageBROKER/Alamy2/16Villa d’Este, Tivoli, Italy
Cardinal d’Este’s garden was grand but playful: One fountain periodically surges to splash unsuspecting visitors; an organ plays music at set times; a long row of fountains offers an intimate place to take a stroll. It launched a new era, wherein entertainment and engagement, as well as beauty and respite, were incorporated into garden design.
Photo: © INSADCO Photography/Alamy3/16The Alhambra and the Generalife, Granada, Spain
The Generalife, the rulers’ hunting lodge, boasts elaborate plantings and an exquisite courtyard that incorporates colonnades and pavilions surrounding a channel-shaped fountain.
Photo courtesy of Château Vaux le Vicomte4/16Château Vaux-le-Vicomte, Maincy, France
In the 1650s, the country’s finance minister, Nicolas Fouquet, hired architect Louis Le Vau, painter Charles Le Brun, and landscape architect André Le Nôtre to create a grand private residence just outside of Paris. Fouquet’s estate was a masterpiece of aesthetic collaboration, with each aspect of the garden enhancing and being complemented by the design of the building. Le Nôtre built dramatic patterned parterres and employed a visual technique called anamorphosis abscondita (“hidden distortion”) to make the grounds seem larger than they actually are when viewed from the château’s balcony.
Photo: © Peter Titmuss/Alamy5/16The Alhambra and the Generalife, Granada, Spain
In 1238, when Spain was under Muslim rule, Muhammad ibn al Ahmar of the Nasrid dynasty established a royal residence at Alhambra, a complex that grew to comprise 35 acres of palaces, terraces, and gardens high in the Sierra Nevada foothills. Its many courtyards, featuring symmetrical planting, architectural elements, and ubiquitous fountains, pools, and rills, serve as an excellent example of Moorish landscape design, which used shade and water to simulate paradise. The site suffered periods of neglect and misguided restoration efforts over the centuries but is now one of Spain’s cherished historic landmarks.
Photo courtesy of Château Vaux le Vicomte6/16Château Vaux-le-Vicomte, Maincy, France
Vaux-le-Vicomte’s beauty inspired a new approach to design, where building and landscape architecture were conceived as a whole. Unfortunately for Fouquet, Louis XIV suspected he had stolen government money to fund such lavish construction and jailed him soon after Vaux-le-Vicomte was completed. The king then hired Le Nôtre, Le Vau, and Le Brun to create Versailles.
Photo: © Photoshot Holdings Ltd/Alamy7/16The Rock Garden at Ryoanji, Kyoto, Japan
Although there is debate about when it was created (estimates include the 15th and 16th centuries), Ryoanji is considered one of Japan’s most important Zen dry gardens and has been widely referenced and imitated around the world. Located in a small Buddhist temple complex, the garden is deceptively simple. It consists of 15 rocks, raked gravel, and a smattering of moss set in a 98-by-32-foot rectangular courtyard.
Photo: © Michael S. Yamashita/Corbis8/16The Rock Garden at Ryoanji, Kyoto, Japan
Visitors do not enter the garden; instead they contemplate it from a wood viewing platform. The shape and placement of the garden’s 15 rocks are said to inspire a spiritual as well as sensory journey. The gravel is raked daily in a precise pattern.
Photo: © David Wei/Alamy9/16Humble Administrator’s Garden, Suzhou, China
Suzhuo was an administrative and trade capital for hundreds of years and starting in the 10th century became famous for its gardens. Nine of them, dating from the 11th to the 19th centuries, are UNESCO World Heritage sites, of which the Humble Administrator’s garden is the largest and most famous. The garden, built around a man-made lake, has been occupied since the 2nd century, but it was expanded in the early 16th century by Wang Xianchen, a Ming Dynasty imperial inspector.
Photo: © Tibor Bognar/Alamy10/16Humble Administrator’s Garden, Suzhou, China
From pathway placements to window openings, every aspect of the layout frames an evocative scene—from a blooming plant to a craggy rock resembling a miniature mountain range—meant to inspire a moment of recognition and reflection.
Photo: © Bildarchiv Monheim GmbH/Alamy11/16Paleis Het Loo, Apeldoorn, The Netherlands
This palace, built by William III in the late 1600s, is often called a mini Versailles because of its axial layout, formal parterres with numerous fountains, and symmetrical gravel paths. But Het Loo was a meant to be a hunting lodge, and its comparatively modest scale demonstrates how the Baroque garden design style of its famous French predecessor was reimagined and reinterpreted by later generations. Het Loo was full of personal touches: William’s wife, Mary II, was a plant enthusiast and the garden featured flora brought from around the world that the gardeners would incorporate into the formal design.
Photo: © Andrew Baskott/Alamy12/16Rousham Park, Oxfordshire, England
At the beginning of the 18th century, the English began to reject the manicured Baroque style in favor of a more open, naturalistic design. In 1738, William Kent, one of the founding practitioners of this new approach, was hired to remodel the house and grounds at Rousham Park. The resulting parkland is one of the most beautiful, and fortunately best preserved, examples of an early English landscape garden. Instead of altering the land to create a flat, bordered private garden, Kent linked the grounds to the surrounding countryside through connected vistas and complementary plantings.
Photo: © Arcaid Images/Alamy13/16Rousham Park, Oxfordshire, England
The estate features sweeping fields and wooded paths that lead to miniature classical temples, adorned with statues of ancient gods.
Photo: Nicolas Chorier/Barcroft India/Getty Images14/16Taj Mahal, Agra, India
This famous mausoleum, commissioned in 1631 by Shah Jahan, the Fifth Moghal emperor, for his third wife Mumtaz Mahal, took 22 years to construct. Its elaborate exterior gardens were altered during a British renovation in the early 1900s (they added green lawns), but much of the original layout remains the same. As was the style with Moghul-era gardens, water is a central element, as is the division of the garden into four equal parts separated in this case by walkways.
Photo: © Leroy Julien/Alamy15/16Taj Mahal, Agra, India
For Shah Jahan, the garden represented paradise as described in the Koran and thus featured abundant fruit trees and blooming plants.
Photo: © Danita Delimont/Alamy16/16Paleis Het Loo, Apeldoorn, The Netherlands
As Het Loo was being completed, William and Mary became rulers of England. The garden was at one point reconfigured to an English landscape style, but the Dutch government restored it to its original design in the 1970s.