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"Beautiful and fascinating Gardens...." 
BBC Gardeners' World Magazine March 2005. 

 "Wonderfully harmonious and strongly recommended..." 
Royal Horticultural Society.

The Gardens at Doddington Hall for many visitors are just as special as the house. The mellow Elizabethan walls provide the framework for the formal East and West Gardens which are faithful to the original Elizabethan layout. 
 

The West Garden, reorganised with the help of Kew in 1900, is a riot of colour from April through to September, with luxuriant, wide borders filled with some botanical surprises such as naturalised Crown Imperials and the Handkerchief Tree. There is a tapestry of box-edged parterres bursting with a glorious display of Bearded Irises in late May / early June and sumptuous herbaceous borders.

The Wild Garden has been developed since the 1950s, initially by Mr & Mrs Ralph Jarvis and then by Antony Jarvis and the late Victoria Jarvis. They have created a spectacular pageant of spring bulbs, starting with snowdrops in February, then there are daffodils, lent lilies, aconites, snakes head fritillaries appearing right through until May.

There are also flowering and scented shrubs, rhododendrons, and an underlying structure is given by some wonderful trees – the ancient, contorted sweet chestnuts that overlook the croquet lawn are still productive.
 

There is also a Temple of the Winds built by Antony Jarvis in memory of his parents, a turf maze that he made in the 1980s, and if you look hard you may find the ‘dinosaur’s egg’ (a large boulder that he put in the branches of a field maple tree to surprise the grandchildren). The two-acre walled Kitchen Garden, with its traditional potting sheds and a large dipping pond, produces wonderful fruit, herbs and vegetables. 

A nature trail starting from just beyond the Temple at the end of the Garden follows a circular route back to the top of the avenue and provides a pleasant and interesting walk of about a mile. The route passes through woodlands, open parkland and a wetland meadow from where the clay was dug to make the bricks to build Doddington.

View our gardens throughout the seasons

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