Day 1 – Welcome to London
While London welcomes travelers through multiple airports, your garden trip with us begins at Heathrow. From there, you’ll make your way on foot to the Hilton London Heathrow Airport hotel, right outside Terminal 4. It’s an easy stroll that lets you shake off the flight and feel the excitement of what’s ahead.
At 6:30 PM, head down to the hotel restaurant where Chris and your fellow Carexplorers will be gathering. You’ll share stories, toast new friendships, and enjoy a Welcome Dinner together (on us, of course). This is where your garden journey across England truly begins!
Accommodation: Hilton London Heathrow Airport
Included: Dinner
Day 2 – The Garden Museum & Chelsea Flower Show
Your garden enthusiast group will hit the ground running early today, with a visit to round off all our garden learnings at the Garden Museum. The museum is all about British gardens and gardening, with temporary exhibits and displays from its permanent collection. Here, we’ll find everything from ancient gardening tools to contemporary innovations. We’ll learn how gardens influenced entire societies. And we’ll follow the stories of the brave (or perhaps even slightly mad) plant hunters who went to the far corners of the world to bring exotic plants back home.
Last but not least, you’ll enjoy a thrilling afternoon spent at the Chelsea Flower Show. Each year, this garden event attracts gardeners and designers from every corner of the globe. The show consistently celebrates design excellence with its Best in Show, Best Fresh Garden, and Best Artisan Garden competitions. The Great Pavilion, where nurseries and plant societies exhibit the best and newest in international horticulture, is not to be missed. We’ll be tired but inspired by the time we leave, having explored what many call the best garden show in the world.
Settle back into Heathrow’s Hilton tonight as we enjoy a well-earned dinner.
Accommodation: Hilton London Heathrow Airport (or similar)
Included: Breakfast, Dinner
Day 3 – Sissinghurst and Great Dixter
Our first garden today is the iconic Sissinghurst Castle Gardens. These treasured gardens result from the commitment and imagination of writer Vita Sackville-West and her diplomat husband, Harold Nicolson. In the 1930s, he planned the gardens’ architecture, and she filled it with lush, romantic plantings. Besides exploring the series of famous garden rooms, make sure you climb the tower and take in the panoramic views from the top. From this vantage point, it’s easy to see why thousands of garden lovers consider a pilgrimage to Sissinghurst an absolute must.
We’ll finish the day with a visit to Great Dixter, perhaps the best-known and most loved of all English gardens. It exists as a living testament to the late owner, plantsman, and writer Christopher Lloyd’s life and passions. Head gardener Fergus Garrett, who worked for Lloyd during the last years of his life, carries on the tradition of experimentation that Lloyd started. Although this garden’s structure dates to the early 20th century, the spirit of the plantings is most certainly contemporary. Under Garrett’s leadership, the garden is being developed and maintained to such a high level that you are unlikely to find any other garden like it. Great Dixter is a visionary, exuberant plant lover’s haven. Expect to see contemporary planting design at its best.
Accommodation: Ashdown Park Hotel, East Grinstead (or similar)
Included: Breakfast, Dinner
Day 4 – Fairlight End and Gravetye Manor
This morning, you’ll head to Fairlight End, a relatively new private garden set on land that slopes steeply from the house downward across wildflower meadows to a pond at the bottom. Chris and Robin Hutt, who bought the property in 2004, were baffled by the unwieldy topography and brought in landscape architect Ian Kitson, whose signature gesture is the curve. At Fairlight End, he inserted a single curvaceous corten steel retaining edge to separate the more refined garden close to the house from the wilder areas below. Fairlight End is not the only example we’ll see this week of the current English taste for wild gardens, but it is undoubtedly the most stylish.
Then it’s onto Gravetye Manor. It’s a country house hotel where we’ll have a special lunch in its Michelin Star restaurant (included) after strolling the gardens with lovely views of the surrounding countryside. Created a century ago by Irish writer, designer, and owner William Robinson, the gardens were used to showcase his ideas about naturalism and wild gardening, contrasting untamed plantings with more structured areas close to the house. Today, the gardens have had an extensive restoration, but don’t expect a historical set piece. After a stint at Great Dixter, Tom Coward is the current head gardener and has boldly added experimental plantings, giving the garden a 21st-century twist.
Accommodation: Ashdown Park Hotel, East Grinstead (or similar)
Included: Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner
Day 5 – Rousham & Broughton Grange
Today’s pace is a bit gentler, starting with Rousham Garden.This is the only 18th-century garden on your itinerary, considered by many to be the single best example of a landscape garden in the country. William Kent, the landscape designer who convinced England’s grand estates to ditch the formal approach and embrace natural landscapes instead, designed it back in the 17s. Little has changed over the centuries at Rousham. The views and accents Kent designed are still there for us to enjoy today. While wandering through it, make sure to leave enough time to check out the walled garden with its long double borders, pigeon house, and kitchen garden.
Then it’s on to Broughton Grange Gardens, nestled in the tranquil Oxfordshire hills. Their fusion of historic charm and contemporary design captures many-a-gardening imagination. Originally developed in the 19th century as part of a private estate, the gardens underwent a transformative redesign in 2001 by renowned landscape architect Tom Stuart-Smith. The garden’s centerpiece: a modern walled garden with carefully layered planting that contrasts beautifully with the older oak woodlands and Victorian glasshouses still scattered across the grounds.
Accommodation: Ettington Park Hotel, Stratford-upon-Avon
Included: Breakfast, Dinner
Day 6 – Pettifers & Free afternoon
You’re heading to Pettifers – a stylish townhouse garden, this morning that proves you don’t need decades of gardening experience to create something stunning. Owner Gina Price started in the early 1990s with a conventional, old-fashioned setup and barely any gardening know-how. Gradually, by visiting other gardens and asking for criticism from knowledgeable friends, Price began editing.
Walk through it now and you’ll see unusual plant combinations, vivid colors that shouldn’t work together but absolutely do, all held in place by a confident structure. Price admits the New Perennials Movement shaped her thinking, but says she couldn’t have a garden without English prettiness. At Pettifers, she’s managed to have both, and somehow, it all works. You’ll tour the garden with Polly, the head gardener, who knows every corner of this place.
The afternoon is yours. You don’t need to rush for any group visits. It’s your free time to explore Stratford-upon-Avon, the medieval market town where Shakespeare was born and where the Royal Shakespeare Company still calls home.
Wander the streets lined with timber-and-white façades and thatched roofs. Check out the cultural sites tied to Shakespeare if that’s your thing… Or skip all that and browse the boutiques for something special to bring home. It’s your call.
Tonight, dinner is on us, so show up hungry and ready to compare notes on how everyone spent their free afternoon.
Accommodation: Ettington Park Hotel, Stratford-upon-Avon
Included: Breakfast, Dinner
Day 7 – Hidcote Manor & Kiftsgate
There are certain gardens that show up in almost every book about English garden design. Hidcote Manor Garden is one of them. And today, you’ll get to experience what all the fuss is about.
Lawrence Johnston, an American plantsman with a strong sense of design, started creating the garden in 1907. What he built is widely considered a masterpiece: a series of hedged, intimate outdoor rooms, each with its individual character, linked by narrow passageways that eventually lead to lawns and views of the countryside beyond. Throughout, Johnston didn’t just plant what was available locally; he went on plant-collecting trips and brought back specimens that made Hidcote unlike anywhere else.
It’s noteworthy that Hidcote, with its themed garden rooms, changed how gardens were made in England and still influences garden-makers today.
By afternoon, you’re at Kiftsgate, a garden shaped by three generations of women from the same family, each one leaving her mark while respecting what came before. Heather Muir started it in the 1920s with no formal plan, just instinct and a bold eye. Her daughter, Diany Binny, took over in the 1950s and added a semicircular swimming pool on the lower level, brought in sculptural pieces, and opened the garden to the public for the first time. Now it’s Anne Chambers, Binny’s daughter, who’s continuing the work. Her new Water Garden is a contemporary oasis, proof that she’s not interested in preserving the past so much as pushing it forward into the 21st century.
Accommodation: Ettington Park Hotel, Stratford-upon-Avon (or similar)
Included: Breakfast, Lunch & Dinner
Day 8 – Wisley and Knepp Estate
This morning, you will travel to the Royal Horticultural Society Garden, Wisley in Surrey. For more than 100 years, Wisley has been a centre of British gardening excellence. Although the garden spans 240 acres, your visit will focus on the demonstration gardens, showcasing everything from stream gardens and meadows to double borders. In May, plantings of camassia, roses, peonies, rhododendrons, and azaleas are of particular interest. Also not to be missed are the perennial borders near the Glasshouse, created by influential designers Tom Stuart-Smith and Piet Oudolf. You will enjoy lunch here at Wisley as well (included).
Set within a pioneering rewilding landscape, you will then stop at the Knepp Estate. You’ll have a couple of hours to stroll through the Walled Garden — a more intimate space where Knepp’s rewilding principles are being explored. Its owners, Isabella Tree and Charles Burrell, have collaborated on this project with some of the leading minds in gardening, including Tom Stuart-Smith, Mick Crawley, James Hitchmough, and Jekka McVicar. Together, they are experimenting with ways to create complex habitats that support wildlife while allowing useful plants to thrive. The aim is to work with nature rather than control it — and you’ll experience what that looks like up close.
Wave goodbye to the countryside and hello to Heathrow’s Hilton. Tonight, we’ll celebrate our grand garden tour over our farewell dinner
Accommodation: Hilton London Heathrow Hotel (or similar)
Included: Breakfast, Lunch & Dinner
Day 9 – Departure Day
Our time together comes to an end. Some of you will head home today. Others might stick around London or continue the adventure elsewhere. Either way, you’ve got one last breakfast before you go. Safe travels, and until the next garden tour calls.
Included: Breakfast