9 Days Chelsea Flower Show & East Anglian Gardens

Day 1 – Welcome to London!

While London welcomes travelers through multiple airports, your garden trip  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.

Be sure to arrive by 4pm, so you have time to settle in before the dinner call. It’s finally time to meet your fellow Carexplorers over a welcome meal – with a fun surprise or two that will have you entertained and sharing laughs like you’re dining with old friends. 

Accommodation: Hilton London Heathrow Airport (or similar)
Included: Dinner

Day 2 – The RHS Chelsea Flower Show

Garden lovers assemble – we begin this jaunt through English horticulture on a real high. In fact, it’s arguably the highest of the highs, because the Chelsea Flower Show is among the most prestigious and talked-about gardening events in the whole world. Curated by the Royal Horticultural Society, a 200-year-old British institution whose gold medal awards can make a gardener’s reputation overnight, it’s right there on the cutting-edge of what’s hot and what’s not in the planting world right now.

The whole place is abuzz with people as much as bees, but you’ll get there nice and early, to be able to glimpse the leading gardens and see the lesser-known enclosures before they start winding down later in the day. Bring a notepad, because this is a real ideas fest. Salvaged steel girders to boundary a lawn? Why not! How about nettles to add texture to traditional beds? Who would’ve thought it!

Accommodation: Hilton London Heathrow Airport (or similar)
Included: Breakfast, Dinner

Day 3 – RHS Garden Hyde Hall & The Old Vicarage

With minds inspired by the groundbreaking (pun intended!) gardening works of the Chelsea Flower Show, you head east into Essex this morning. Watch as the big urban sprawl of London gives way to tree-speckled hills and undulating fields of maize. It’s in this bucolic setting that RHS Hyde Hall makes its home. Think of it as the place the royal society shows off what it can do. At one point they prove they’re the masters of classic English rose gardens with, well, incredible rose gardens. Then, suddenly, you find yourself in an unexpected dry garden of mountain thyme and tough euphorbia that’s mulched with layers of heavy gravel – they say it’s not been watered since 2003! Show-offs. Fantastic, fantastic show-offs.

Balancing that out, this afternoon’s garden: East Ruston Old Vicarage. You’ll be greeted here by either Alan Gray, the actual creator of the garden, or one of the current head gardeners. They’ll give an intro into what it’s all about: juxtapositions of unique climactic gardens, from exotic subtropical planting to Mediterranean natives. Then, get a-wandering, as there are crocus beds, Dutch tulip beds, big green musa basjoo banana trees, and manicured lawns topped with sculptures that bob in the Norfolk wind for you to enjoy.

Accommodation: Park Farm Hotel (or similar)
Included: Breakfast, Dinner

Day 4 – Holkham Hall Gardens & Old Manor Farm House

A gardening tour of England would not be complete without a big dose of English country estate gardens – don’t worry, there are quite a few to come! These are the lifeblood of British horticulture; places where nobles and landowners have experimented and showed off for centuries. Enter Holkham Hall Gardens, the grounds of a 17th-century Palladian manor house perched above the rolling waves of the North Norfolk coast. You’ll pass through the vast grounds, crafted in the style of Lancelot “Capability” Brown – think big, open spaces, naturally planted gallery woods, and the feeling of a real, royal hunting reserve. Then, you duck into the walled garden, where everything draws you in, salvias rise in lovely rows, prairie grasses flick this way and that, and Victorian glasshouses hide grapes and lemon trees.

Once more, we balance out something grand from the RHS with something more niche and under-the-radar. Cue the Old Manor Farm House, a private garden that emerged from nothing but rough farm fields in the 1990s to become an homage to Low Country horticulture extraordinaire. It really looks the part beneath the brick-fronted Dutch mansion at its center (a building that’s been there 400 years, no less!). You’ll get lost in narrow hedgerow mazes, walk avenues flanked by plane trees, and pass through wildflower meadows that will likely be beaming in late May.

Accommodation: Park Farm Hotel (or similar)
Included: Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Day 5 – Sandringham Estate & Dale Farm

Don your Sunday best today, for you’re heading to the Norfolk estate of one King Charles III – heard of him? Sandringham has gardens that date back all the way to the high Victorian period, but they’re forever changing, shifting, being recreated and reshaped, often through consultation with the monarch of the time. You’ll get to see the neat topiary gardens that were added under the current king, along with a cottage garden that hails from the reign of King George VI, and an old English oak planted by Queen Victoria herself!

After lunch at Sandringham (where you’ll be royally fed – see what we did there?), you’ll visit a very different garden. This one’s less regal, more hydrangeas-out-of-every-darn-crevice. Yep, at Dale Farm, the focus is very much on layering flowering perennials, a whopping 1,000 varieties of them! You’ll navigate those thickets of purples, yellows and blues on neat gravel paths and grassy verges, which knit the whole thing together wonderfully.

Accommodation: Park Farm Hotel (or similar)
Included: Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Day 6 – The Bressingham Gardens & Clover Cottage

Yesterday you trod in the footsteps of actual British royalty, today you’ll be meeting horticultural royalty. Head to Bressingham Gardens, where you’ll be greeted by Adrian Bloom, creator of the Foggy Bottom gardens at Bressingham itself, not to mention some pretty darn prestigious green spaces over in Elm Bank, Massachusetts! He’ll talk of planting techniques and design styles as you pass below the giant redwoods, something of a homage to the species of North America, and out into the rose-scented fragrant garden.

It’s time for another charming cottage garden next. Even the name induces a sigh: Clover Cottage. It really does look the part, too – think thatched roofs hanging over beds of snowdrops and narcissus, expertly trimmed rose borders beside plots of hostas and ferns. Come the peak spring, this one should be a real postcard; a sort of pristine English fairytale of a garden, where you’ll be transported to another world as you meander between the lawns and shaded spaces.

Accommodation: Gonville Hotel (or similar)
Included: Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Day 7 – Cambridge University Botanic Garden & Cambridge

Thinking caps on? Good. Cambridge University beckons today; the second-oldest university in the English-speaking world. True to their erudite reputation, they have one of the UK’s leading botanical research institutes, which you find at the Cambridge University Botanic Garden. With help from a guide, you’ll navigate the site’s 8,000 species as you walk avenues created by the mentor of a certain Charles Darwin, crank up the humidity in the rainforested glasshouses, and appreciate the honeypot bee borders that buzz with life (especially in spring!).

Then, after close to a whole week of garden-packed days, we think it’s time you had an afternoon off. Better than that, we think it’s time you had an afternoon off in the historic city of Cambridge. It’ll feel like you’ve just been dropped into a Dickens novel as you appreciate the slow-flowing Cam River, move between the pubs and the half-timbered houses and take moments on the green lawns of the university colleges. ‘Idyllic’ doesn’t quite do it justice.

Accommodation: Gonville Hotel (or similar)
Included: Breakfast     

Day 8 – Impington Mill, The Barn Garden & Serge Hill

Your morning will be filled with dancing daffodils and hawthorn, in an ode to the romance of  planting at Impington Mill. Bought by Pippa and Steve Temple in 2000, both the mill and the garden have been painstakingly refurbished, planting over 28,000 bulbs and 28 trees. A wandering “secret” path flows through the garden, where white plants are the theme du jour.

Then, your final pitstop: The Barn Garden and Serge Hill. This is two gardens in one. First, the artist’s palette that is Tom Stuart-Smith’s Barn Garden. Consider it a sandbox – a place to play with ideas, planting combos, angles, light, materials. In one space, you see salvias beautifully placed beside reflective water tanks. In another, there’s a whole bed yet to be planted, or wild prairies left to grow free.

Serge Hill, garden number two, sits just alongside, yet, somehow the transition from one to the other feels big. You go from designated garden sections to a space that’s ruffled around the edges, deliberately wild and loose. The no-dig, no-herbicide policies of gardener Kate Stuart-Smith are revealed as you move down the crooked pebble paths and survey how the beds of clambering perennials abut the berry bushes and gnarled apple trees.

Accommodation: Hilton London Heathrow Airport (or similar)
Included: Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Day 9 – Farewell gardeners (or perhaps not!)

This morning might be farewell time, but it doesn’t have to be – there’s an optional extension to take in the big city of London and its world-famous Kew Gardens if that tickles your fancy. If not, then it’s goodbye to your Carex crew. Tears will flow, hugs will be given, numbers swapped, for the airport – and departure – awaits. Don’t be surprised if, as the rolling green of England disappears beneath your feet, you find yourself already planning your next garden-inspiring adventure! 

Included: Breakfast

Optional Post-Trip Extension

Day 9 Continued, Saturday May 29 – Kew Gardens & London time

Kew Gardens is one of those places that rewards slowing down. You’ll spend part of your visit with a Kew guide, who’ll share the stories behind the gardens, point out some of the collections you might otherwise walk straight past, and explain why Kew continues to play such an important role in plant conservation today. 

Afterwards, you’re free to wander at your own pace, following whatever catches your eye, before regrouping for a central drop point so you can head out and explore London as you please. Meet your arranged transfer back to the hotel in the mid afternoon, or make your own way back when your day feels complete. 

Your overnight stay is included and tonight’s for spending it how you like.

Accommodation: Hilton London Heathrow Airport (or similar)
Included: Breakfast

Day 10, Sunday May 30 – Departure

Savour a final breakfast before departing the hotel for your onward flight. It’s just a short walk over to the departure terminal. An oh-so-easy finale to your English Gardens extravaganza!

Included: Breakfast