Have your say in the Historic Houses Garden of the Year Awards 2025

Iford Manor garden
The garden at Iford Manor.
(Image credit: Clive Nichols for Country Life)

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 garden

Hestercombe.

(Image credit: Alamy Stock Photo)

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.

Gardens at Lowther Castle

The gardens at Lowther Castle.

(Image credit: Paul Highnam / Country Life / Future)

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.

Bluebell wood in Kent

Hole Park, Kent.

(Image credit: Hole Park)

‘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.

Annunciata Elwes

Annunciata grew up in the wilds of Lancashire and now lives in Hampshire with a husband, two daughters and an awful pug called Parsley. She’s been floating round the Country Life office for more than a decade, her work winning the Property Magazine of the Year Award in 2022 (Property Press Awards). Before that, she had a two-year stint writing ‘all kinds of fiction’ for The Sunday Times Travel Magazine, worked in internal comms for Country Life’s publisher (which has had many names in recent years but was then called IPC Media), and spent another year researching for a historical biographer, whose then primary focus was Graham Greene and John Henry Newman and whose filing system was a collection of wardrobes and chests of drawers filled with torn scraps of paper. During this time, she regularly gave tours of 17th-century Milton Manor, Oxfordshire, which may or may not have been designed by Inigo Jones, and co-founded a literary, art and music festival, at which Johnny Flynn headlined. When not writing and editing for Country Life, Annunciata is also a director of TIN MAN ART, a contemporary art gallery founded in 2021 by her husband, James Elwes.