Gallerıes garden in the

If you love sculpture and paintings as much as plants, take a visit to one of these gardens that combine art with their lovely landscaping

Art and gardening have always gone hand in hand. From the illustrators of medieval manuscripts to painters as diverse as Monet – whose garden at Giverny in France is still a major tourist attraction today – Renoir, Matisse, Klimt, Georgia O’Keeffe and Frida Kahlo, artists through the ages have been heavily influenced by gardens and nature in their work.

If you enjoy both art and beautiful gardens, there are a number of places which elegantly combine the two. Created by the hugely influential Dutch designer Piet Oudolf, who uses herbaceous perennials and grasses to create a flowing, naturalistic style of planting, the garden at Hauser & Wirth at Bruton in Somerset surrounds an award-winning gallery and contemporary arts centre. The current exhibition is The Land We Live In – The Land We Left Behind, with work by artists including Beatrix Potter, William Holman Hunt, Frank Lloyd Wright and Mark Wallinger; it runs until 7 May. See hauserwirthsomerset.com.

The extensive parkland at Petworth House in West Sussex was remodelled by Capability Brown and painted by Turner. Today the garden is planted with thousands of spring bulbs and has a good collection of trees; in summer visitors enjoy the wildflower meadow. The picture collection at Petworth is truly outstanding, with works by Titian, van Dyck, Reynolds and Blake, and there are exquisite wood carvings by Grinling Gibbons. See nationaltrust.org.uk.

At Kew Gardens in south-west London, many visitors are so busy exploring the 300 acres of gardens that they miss out on the delightful Marianne North Gallery, nestled in the grounds. Miss Nor th was a wealthy and intrepid Victorian spinster who travelled the world painting the exotic flora and fauna of countries such as India, South Africa, Brazil, Jamaica and Australia. The gallery, opened in 1882, is a real treasure trove, with over 800 of her wonderfully vivid botanical paintings. See kew.org.

East on Walled Gardens near Grantham in Lincolnshire, which is renowned for it s romantic drifts of hellebores and aconites in early spring, opens for the season tomorrow. You can also enjoy an exhibition of works by three contemporary botanical painters, depicting ‘A Year In The Gar-

den’, which runs until 11 March. See visiteaston.co.uk.

The Yorkshire Sculpture Park,

which celebrated its 40th anniversary last year, is located in the 500-acre Bretton Hall estate near Wakefield. As you wander through the landscaped garden, you’ll find works by artists including Elisabeth Frink, Ai Weiwei and Antony Gormley. There’s nowhere else quite like it. See ysp.org.uk.

The grounds of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh provide a fitting backdrop to sculptures by Rachel Whiteread, Henry Moore and Dame Barbara Hepworth, among others. The lawn to the front of the building was designed as a strikingly modern garden space by the American architectural historian Cha rles Jencks. Known as Landform Ueda, it’s a snaking, stepped mound of closely mown grass with crescentshaped pools of water, and was inspired by patterns of nature, from meteorological effects to chaos theory. See nationalgalleries.org.

Marianne North’s painting of an Indian rhododendron (above), on display at Kew Gardens (above left)

A Gainsborough at Petworth House (left) and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (above)