Winners revealed

Thousands of you voted for your favourite gardens that open for the National Garden Scheme. Now we can reveal the winners of 2023’s Nation’s Favourite Gardens competition, supported by Sisley Garden Tours. There are six regional winners, one overall champion and a winning garden that usually opens to the public but donates takings from a particular day (or days) to the Scheme.

Turn over to discover these seven superb gardens, and learn about the gardeners who created them.

Rockcliffe, Gloucestershire

Overall Winner & Regional Winner: South West

Fronted by a flight of yew topiary birds, the dovecote at Rockcliffe is the garden’s most recognisable feature. This area was crying out for a beautiful focal point and, after much research, owners Emma and Simon Keswick settled on a dovecote, taking inspiration from the dovecote at Rousham, weathervanes at Eton College Chapel, the windows of the Gothic Cottage at Stourhead and stonework from the Old Toll House in Stow-on-the-Wold. In summer, the dovecote appears to float on a cloud of ox-eye daisies, while the doves eye up brassicas in the kitchen garden at the foot of the slope.

This is just one example of the considered perfection visitors can find at Rockcliffe, Emma and Simon’s home since the 1980s. When they arrived there wasn’t much beyond the house itself and some surrounding fields. Emma began by marking out the garden, pacing eastwards until the proportions felt right. A wide lawn now leads towards a ha-ha built to keep out the sheep and is flanked by huge beech obelisks in not quite parallel lines that give the impression that the vista is even longer. “It’s an idea I saw at the Palazzo Corsini in Florence, where they achieve the same effect using statues,” Emma explains. The couple find inspiration from a multitude of places: “The ideas have to come from somewhere!” adds Emma.

This is a garden that has been made slowly and with care over the past four decades, giving it an atmosphere of comfortable familiarity that’s tangible to i