Why I swapped the Med for a flowerbed

I wanted to get off my phone. I wanted to be able to distinguish between an Agapanthus “Queen Mum” and an Agapanthus “Black Pantha”. I wanted to buy a pair of those weird rubber gardening clogs. In short: I wanted to optimise my holiday by visiting a garden.

A Google search threw up 10-acre Nant y Bedd in the Black Mountains. It was roughly a 30-minute drive from the 17th-century corn mill we were staying in, which felt like it was in the middle of a lonely Welsh valley but was in fact in Abergavenny, which has a Michelin-starred restaurant and a giant Waitrose. “Is this one of those places where we’ll be the youngest people by 30 years?” my husband Ollie asked as we navigated a tiny country lane and marvelled at the sheer number of trees choking the sat-nav signal. 

We parked up parallel to the barn. A friendly greeting by Sue Mabberley, the garden’s co-owner, was semi-drowned out, much to her distress, by the sound of workmen from the Welsh forestry commission. “Don’t worry, we live just off the Holloway Road,” I shouted back. “This is positively tranquil.” And it was. A fairytale mix of toadflax, sweet peas, foxgloves and ox-eye daisies; then a rope bridge leading over emerald ferns to a natural swimming pond; a wildflower meadow filled with pignut; a treehouse wedged in a sycamore; a forest of Douglas fir and the sparkling Grwyne Fawr river. “What did we used to do on holiday?” I mused, now firmly in my #backtonaturegirl era. “Can we go to the pub?” Ollie responded.

According to Skyscanner, 62 per cent of travellers enjoy visiting gardens during their holidays. Data from Visit Britain reveals almost a third of all visits annually to the UK include a trip to a garden or park. The Newt in Somerset boasts a bucolic working estate where guests can sample some of its 70 types of apples in the cider tastings. Perhaps you’d like to try flower arranging at Hampshire’s Heckfield Place using seasonal flowers from its market garden? At Oxfordshire’s Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons, chef Raymond Blanc’s gardening-school classes have included how to plant your own Japanese tea garden or mushroom valley.

The trend dovetails with an uptick in younger enthusiasts. A 2020 survey of 2,000 18- to 34-year-olds found that 83 per cent now identify gardening as “cool”, and 54 per cent would rather hang out in a garden centre than a nightclub. Dior creative director Jonathan Anderson is currently selling antique gardening tools sourced by Garden & Wood at his rebooted JW Anderson label. Meanwhile, half of Brooklyn and east London respectively are wearing some variation on the hemp Plasticana Gardana gardening shoes. 

“There’s a younger generation trying to find things that feel more wholesome, more slow. That’s where gardening comes in,” says Üla Maria, the 33-year-old Lithuania-born, London-based landscape gardener who, in 2024, was the youngest ever to win “best in show” at RHS Chelsea Flower Show. Though Maria doesn’t seek out formal gardens, she does holiday in areas of natural beauty: the medieval town of Besalú near Girona and the volcanic La Garrotxa park, the Levada do Caldeirão Verde trail in Madeira and a Whitstable beach are all recent finds. She also recommends the 98km-long Curonian Spit, a giant sand dune with ancient forests in her native Lithuania, where her love of gardening was inculcated by a grandmother with a rare lily collection.

My holiday destinations are dictated by the proximity of a bonsai exhibition

Where once my holiday destinations were dictated by the cheapest Ryanair route, I now consider the proximity of a bonsai exhibition or forest. A reporting trip to France’s Loire Valley segued into a visit to the Parc Oriental de Maulévrier, a Japanese garden planted with azaleas, rhododendrons and maples. A weekend in the Costa Brava with friends meant a mandatory visit to the Jardíns de Cap Roig botanical garden, which has an impressive cacti collection. A 3pm wedding in Suffolk left enough time for a quick turn around Beth Chatto’s gardens, with pale-purple “Jane Philips” irises and swaggering orange Eremurus “Cleopatra”. In the garden of Stockholm’s Ett Hem hotel, I learnt what “pleached” meant, and spent the journey home fantasising about lining the patch of decking that passes for a garden behind our London flat.

On the advice of Verity Parker, a fashion stylist whose brother runs Alexandra Nurseries in south London, I checked out the National Garden Scheme. Gardens owned by members of the public open throughout the year to raise money; in 2024, it raised £3,501,227, for charities including Macmillan Cancer Support. Its former CEO George Plumptre, who remembers directing visitors to his mother’s garden open days as a child, reports that anecdotally the scheme has seen a noticeable increase in younger visitors since the pandemic. “This is part of the contemporary trend of people viewing gardens not just as horticultural spaces – which can be intimidating if you feel that you are a novice or lacking in knowledge of plants – but as spaces that are good for your health and wellbeing.” The website revealed a garden was open that afternoon in Norwich, where I was visiting my parents, so I set off with two £5 notes and my mum to investigate.

As we stepped through the gate into the back garden of the house in a suburban cul-de-sac, we were involuntarily silenced. We had been teleported to the Bahamas: 15ft-tall banana plants, orange Chinese lantern plants, glossy big-leaved Canna lilies, blood-red passion flowers and an enormous eucalyptus. The discombobulating effect was heightened by the scores of people wandering round nibbling on homemade sausage rolls to the sound of pan pipes. The owner, Sonja, went tropical in 2006, with the introduction of three banana plants, inspired by a visit to the late Will Giles’s exotic garden in Thorpe. “I thought, ‘How the hell’s he doing this?’” Turns out, the East Anglian climate is perfectly suited to tropicals. “Only the frost you’ve got to avoid.” I purchased an orchid kokedama on my way out. Who needs to travel?