52 Beautifully Landscaped Home Gardens
Residents of large cities like New York and Philadelphia often depend on public botanical gardens to immerse themselves in nature. But homeowners with more property can enjoy beautiful topiaries and high-design pergolas and trellises in exquisitely landscaped gardens just steps from their front doors. Lemon trees, olive trees, agave, and cacti are only a few examples of the unexpected greenery used to add texture and color in these gardens from the AD archives. With warm weather right around the corner, let these breathtaking scenes—devised by such landscape architects as Louis Benech and Ronald van der Hilst—inspire your next plantings.
At Sting and Trudie Styler’s home in Tuscany , an ancient cedar of Lebanon overlooks the parterre, formally known as Il Giardino dei Limoni, or garden of the lemon trees. It was created by landscape designer Arabella Lennox-Boyd.
Jewelry designer Elizabeth Locke enlisted Andy Lewis of Neumann Lewis Buchanan Architects to create a new kitchen wing (at right) for Clay Hill , her 1816 house in Virginia; the existing interiors were transformed with the help of decorator Alison Martin. Boxwood parterres and walls of reclaimed limestone distinguish Italianate gardens by landscape designer Sue Bowman.
Landscape designer Miranda Brooks conceived the garden in designer Laura Santos’s Manhattan townhouse .
Cole Park, the English country manor that designer Anouska Hempel shares with her husband, Sir Mark Weinberg, dates from the mid-16th century. The house is surrounded by formal gardens, including this enclosure of high hornbeam hedges; the Belgian-stone table, by Hempel, is flanked by rows of catalpa trees.
Beneath a vine-clad pergola at the same home , vintage Indian lanterns dangle above an antique Pakistani table.
A redbrick section of theEnglish manor overlooks side gardens created by Anouska Hempel Design.
In the gardens of a house on Ibiza by the firm Carden Cunietti, olive trees flourish amid yellow-flowered santolina and mounds of gray-green germander.
The gardens of a Northern California home are the work of Stephen Suzman of SCDA.
The charmingly antique gardens by Gertrude Jekyll offer sweeping views of the Hampshire, England, countryside .
Rows of boxwood line a lily pond at the English home’s sunken garden.
Landscape architect Suzanne Turner revived the original Olmsted Brothers gardens at this Houston home . The music-room terrace looks across a narrow lawn to an 18th-century French stone fountain from Chateau Domingue.
Lemon trees scent the same terrace , which is outfitted with late-19th-century iron furniture.
In the garden of a Manhattan home , artist Hani Shihada masked a window with an adaptation of a 15th-century tarot card.
A terraced garden by landscape architect Dennis Hickok supplies Gisele Bündchen and Tom Brady’s Los Angeles home with an array of fruits and vegetables.
The homeowners of this upstate New York lakeside getaway by McAlpine bought and razed a neighboring home to bring their property closer to its historic acreage; the plot is now occupied by a garden outfitted with chaise longues by Sutherland.
An artfully composed garden room in the late Oscar de la Renta’s Dominican Republic home features the bristling century plant and variegated agave, both at left; lanky consolea and candelabra euphorbia, at center; and diminutive golden-barrel cactus, throughout.
Lemon trees and boxwood hedges are featured in the garden of a family home outside Venice renovated by Studio Peregalli.
On the terrace of designer Ken Fulk’s home in San Francisco, flowering dogwood branches spill across an antique Japanese worktable partially shaded by a grove of Japanese maples in the Zen-inspired garden. The benches and deck are redwood, which is also used on the house’s façade.
The garden façade of Villa Cetinale , the 17th-century Tuscan residence of Ned and Marina Lambton, the Earl and Countess of Durham. Designed by Carlo Fontana for a nephew of Pope Alexander VII, the house was restored by architect Bolko von Schweinichen and interior designer Camilla Guinness.
A Dutch garden by landscape architect Ronald van der Hilst is banked by angled berms and rounded hedges, and a 95-foot-long reflecting pool terminates its main axis.
At a Minneapolis home , greenery surrounds the fountain in a garden by British designer Arne Maynard.
An heirloom stone basin centers a walled garden outside a French home ; garden guru Louis Benech added topiaries to lend rhythm and whimsy.
Boxwood hedges border a path in this San Francisco–area garden , which was updated by Strata Landscape Architecture; the cushions on the outdoor furniture are clad in a DeLany & Long fabric.
A Manhattan garden designed by Jeffrey Bilhuber is framed with mirror-backed trelliswork by Accents of France.
Boxwood hedges outline an Illinois home garden landscaped by Scott Byron & Co.
Julianne Moore’s New York City garden was designed by Sawyer | Berson.
At the same home, Brian Sawyer chose a suite of vintage Woodard garden chairs to match a table Moore already owned; staghorn ferns are mounted on the façade.
Arabella Lennox-Boyd designed the garden of Sting and Trudie Styler's London townhouse .
An herb garden, the work of landscape designer Phillip Watson, lies just off the kitchen’s porch at this home in the southeastern U.S.
Jack, a Brazilian terrier, is at home in one of the garden rooms of this Isay Weinfeld–designed Brazilian villa , where vintage iron-wire chairs are pulled up to a florist’s worktable.
At Patrick Dempsey’s Malibu, California, home, landscaped by Shrader Design, flowers, herbs, and vegetables flourish in the garden’s raised beds, which are constructed from reclaimed scaffolding; the area is paved with gravel and stabilized decomposed granite.
Breakfast awaits beneath a towering magnolia in the Paris garden of decorative-arts dealers Laurence and Patrick Seguin.
In the entrance courtyard of a Los Angeles home, local firm Modern Floristry designed the Italianate garden, which includes a pair of lead fountains (one is shown) from Authentic Provence.
A Bridgehampton, New York, house nestles into serene gardens by Gunn Landscape Architecture.
A dogwood shades the terrace of this Brooklyn home ; the garden was created by Christina Michas Landscape Design.
A boxwood parterre is planted with violas and petunias on the grounds of a California residence landscaped by Elizabeth Everdell Garden Design.
In the same home, one corner of the garden features foxgloves, roses, cardoons, and tree mallow.
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A boxwood parterre opens to the lush lawns at a South Carolina plantation .
A sculpture by Nathalie Decoster sits amid a garden conceived by landscape architect Edmund Hollander a the Bridgehampton, New York, home . The residence was crafted by architect Kevin Clark of Historical Concepts and designer Steven Gambrel.
Once restrained and now riotous, Fernando Caruncho’s famous green garden in Madrid —which he created in the 1980s—was reenvisioned with thousands of white cosmos.
A quaint garden shed is surrounded by greenery at Christopher and Amanda Brooks's English country home .
Paula Hayes designed the gardens at the Hamptons getaway of gallery owner Dominique Lévy and movie producer Dorothy Berwin using a palette of blues, grays, greens, lavender, and cream.
A castellated yew hedge divides the boxwood knot garden from the rose garden at the Connecticut home of Tommy and Dee Hilfiger.
The cobbled rose garden at the same home features a fountain by Phillip Watson; Miranda Brooks designed the landscape.
The climbing rose ‘Cécile Brünner’ is trained over an arbor in the garden of Elizabeth Taylor's Bel Air estate ; the property was landscaped by Campion Walker Garden Design. Pink cestrum and gold breath of heaven are planted around the bench; ‘Elizabeth Taylor,’ a shocking-pink hybrid tea rose introduced in 1985, flourishes nearby.
The cutting garden at a Tennessee compound is filled with both perennials and annuals; it was designed by landscape architect Mary Palmer Dargan. Beyond it are a newly planted apple orchard and, nestled at the edge of the woods, the Writer's Cottage.
Boxwood-edged parterres define the kitchen garden at M. Night Shyamalan's estate near Philadelphia .
Orderly allées of apple and pear trees and yew topiary in a Belgian estate 's orchard, designed by Wirtz International.
A grotto fountain in the garden of Villa Lunardi, a Tuscan villa belonging to Dede Pratesi of the revered luxury linens firm.
At the California home of architect Marc Appleton, the rose garden’s beds are bordered with hedges of dwarf myrtle. A Greek olive jar sits under a canopy of California live oaks.
The lush gardens at Joan and Sandy Weill's Sonoma Valley residence include a section planted with roses, zinnias, delphiniums, phlox, coneflowers, and periwinkles.
‘Blue Fortune’ hyssop flowers bloom in a Minneapolis garden .