Worldwide Garden Hotel Short Breaks

Garden visiting seems to have begun around the 1500s. North Europeans began visiting Italy to see its renaissance gardens and North Chinese began visiting South China, especially Suzhou and Hangzhou, to see their famous scholar gardens. Both areas retain their popularity with garden visitors. They have comparable climatic conditions and we strongly recommed visiting them in the month of May. Air travel has now made it easy to plan a garden short break anywhere in the world and those of us who have our own gardens can feel less guilty than others about our imapact on global warming, because gardens make a significant contribution to carbon sequestration. From a tourism-planning perspective, another attractive aspect of garden visiting is that good gardens can be made anywhere and can draw tourists away from heavily trafficed tourist hot-spots. It will however become necessary to limit visitor numbers in the most famous ancient gardens: we suggest this should be done by raising entry fees a little and by discouraging school parties.

Our top five garden short breaks:

Italy - Tuscany and Lazio
China - Shanghai, Suzhou and Hangzhou
England - Kent and Sussex or Oxfordshire and Yorkshire
Japan - Kyoto
France - Paris and the Loire