‘Bursting with colour’: readers’ favourite UK gardens | United Kingdom holidays

Winning tip: Amber drifts, North Yorkshire

The Walled Garden of Scampston, near Malton, offers so much: it’s a series of contemporary garden rooms within the walls of the 18th-century kitchen garden, and has a beautifully restored conservatory, a garden cafe and a plant shop. In 2003, Dutch designer Piet Oudolf (who co-designed New York City’s High Line) created contrasts in structure and form: from yew pillars, box squares and pleached limes through amber drifts of molinia grasses to the perennial flower meadow. Scampston Hall is the Legard family home and in its grounds you can explore trails through the 18th-century Capability Brown landscape, passing mature trees, follies and an ornamental lake.
Gardens-only ticket adult £9, child £5, scampston.co.uk
Susanna Callaghan

Whisper in awe, Cromarty, near Inverness

Miller’s Yard: Garden of Wonders is little more than a back yard, but it’s a secret, silent space, packed full of the wonders of its title – a visual and sensory microcosm of art, geology and nature. Admire okra-green ferns, candy-headed geraniums and pink-spiked persicaria, each artfully peeping out where they will, swaying in the breeze, as do swallows and dragonflies. Gulp at a huge ammonite sculpture in etched brass and copper scrap metal, patina’d orange and maroon. Step on fossil fish shapes indented in the bleached-grey flagstones. A quiet remote place where visitors whisper in awe.
Adult £6.50, nts.org.uk
Ann Tudor

Lincolnshire’s secret

The Secret Garden in the market town of Louth is a tropical paradise, packed with a fascinating array of plants including 15 varieties of bananas. The path winds around a pond and an exotic island, with several seating areas, the air spiced with evocative fragrances. The owners, as plant collectors, continually seek new delights. This private garden is open for the NGS throughout July and August.
£3, booking essential, findagarden.ngs.org.uk
Jennie

Essex experiment

Hilldrop, in Horndon-on-the-Hill, is an experimental garden using industrial waste as its soil, a dry garden, a recycling garden – and it’s an experiment that has worked, because it’s the most beautiful garden we have visited, teeming with insects and birdlife. It’s hard to believe that this breathtaking beauty was created from materials used to widen the A13, among other unlikely substrates. It’s a living, organic example of how our gardens can thrive through…