Garden Tours: How to Find the Best Gardens to Visit Near You and Around the World

Garden tours are often perceived as an activity for retired horticulturists with ample leisure time, but that view misses who actually fills garden tour spots. Professional landscape designers, home gardeners looking for design ideas, and anyone with a general interest in plants and outdoor spaces make up the majority of garden tour visitors. The best garden tours open access to private properties and working botanical collections that you could not visit on your own, which is what makes them worth the planning.

Finding a best garden to tour requires knowing where to look. Most great gardens are not well-advertised to the general public, particularly private gardens that open only during specific charity events or horticultural society open days. Understanding how garden tour events are organized and who runs them points you toward the opportunities before they sell out.

Types of Garden Tours Available

Open Garden Events and Charity Tours

The National Garden Scheme in the United Kingdom publishes an annual guide listing great gardens that open their gates for charity fundraising on specific dates. Hundreds of private gardens across the UK participate each year, ranging from cottage gardens under half an acre to country estates with formal parterres and kitchen gardens spanning several acres. This model has inspired similar programs in other countries, including Canada’s Garden Open Days and various state-level programs in the United States.

Charity garden tour events typically charge an entry fee of $5 to $20 that goes directly to the benefiting organization. The host gardener is usually present and willing to discuss their plants, design choices, and maintenance practices. This direct access to the person who designed and built the garden is something a public botanical garden garden tour rarely offers.

Botanical Garden and Public Garden Tours

Public botanical gardens represent some of the best gardens for organized tours because they combine curatorial knowledge, labeled plant collections, and professional tour guides into a single visit. Many botanical gardens offer guided tours led by staff horticulturists who can answer questions about specific plants, cultivation history, and the garden’s design philosophy. These tours often cover areas of the garden not accessible during self-guided visits.

Seasonal timing shapes the value of any botanical garden tour significantly. Spring bulb collections, summer rose gardens, autumn foliage walks, and winter garden structures each offer different experiences at the same location. Planning your garden tour around peak bloom for a specific plant collection produces a more rewarding visit than arriving outside that window.

How to Find Great Gardens Near You

Start your search for a garden tour or best garden visit with your local horticultural society or garden club. These organizations maintain networks of private gardeners who open their properties periodically and receive advance notice of tour dates that do not appear in general event listings. Membership in a local garden club often includes access to private garden tours that non-members cannot join.

State and regional agricultural extensions publish calendars of garden events. Master gardener programs often coordinate best gardens open days as part of their public education mission. Tourism offices in horticulturally active regions, such as the Pacific Northwest, New England, and the Pacific Coast of California, maintain lists of great gardens and organized garden tour events that are genuinely useful starting points.

Planning a Garden Tour Trip

International garden tours offer access to some of the world’s most influential designed landscapes. The great gardens of England, France, Japan, and the Netherlands shaped much of what we consider classic garden design, and visiting them in person provides a scale, context, and sensory experience that photographs cannot replicate. Group tours organized by horticultural societies and travel companies with garden specializations handle logistics and typically provide expert commentary throughout the trip.

For a self-guided international garden tour, build an itinerary around a specific region or design tradition rather than trying to see too many gardens across too large a geography. Spending two days at one great garden reveals more about its design than a half-day stop at five different sites. The best garden experiences come from slowing down and returning to the same spaces at different times of day to see how light and shadow change the composition.