What gardens in China, France, Spain, Ireland and England taught me about climate, comfort and connection to place.
Ludovic and I recently travelled through China, France, Spain, Ireland and England on holiday and, of course, I could not resist visiting gardens along the way. A busman’s holiday? Probably.
But I was not simply looking at plants. I found myself noticing how places made me feel: where I sought shade, where I wanted to linger, how people moved through a space, how gardens responded to climate, and how plants could unexpectedly connect me with home.
Some visits were carefully planned. Others were happy discoveries. And occasionally, what stayed with me was not what I had expected at all.
From the intimacy of a Ming garden in Shanghai to the heat-baked lawns of London, these places kept bringing me back to questions we think about at Inwardout Studio: How do we create places that are comfortable, resilient and connected to their surroundings, and to the people who use them?
Here are a few postcards from my travels, and some of the ideas I brought home to Lutruwita / Tasmania.
You can read from start to finish, or follow your curiosity and jump to the places that interest you most.
Choose a garden to explore:
- People’s Square, Shanghai, China
- Yu Garden, Shanghai, China
- Palace and Gardens of Versailles, France
- Le Jardin de Jeanot, La Tessoualle, France
- Journées de la Rose, Doué-la-Fontaine, France
- Parc Oriental de Maulévrier, France
- Park Güell, Barcelona, Spain
- Jardí Botànic de Barcelona, Spain
- Ilnacullin – Garinish Island, Ireland
- St Stephen’s Green, Dublin, Ireland
- Hyde Park, London, England
- St James’s Park, London, England
- Bringing the ideas home
People’s Square, Shanghai, China
My strongest impression of People’s Square was simply its scale.
In a city of extraordinary density and verticality, the breadth of this civic landscape feels almost unexpected. Broad lawns, formal planting, generous pedestrian spaces and the adjoining People’s Park create a substantial green and open centre within the surrounding city.
The square occupies part of Shanghai’s former racecourse and is now framed by major civic and cultural buildings. Yet what stayed with me was less its history than the experience of having so much room around me.
In a very large, densely populated city, open space itself becomes a luxury. Public landscapes do not always need to impress us through elaborate planting or design. Sometimes their greatest value lies simply in giving people space to gather, move and breathe.
What stayed with me: The sheer luxury of open space in an intensely urban city.
Yu Garden, Shanghai, China
Yu Garden, or Yuyuan, could hardly be more different.
This exquisite Ming-era garden of only about two hectares unfolds through pavilions, ponds, rockeries, winding paths and carefully framed views. Its beauty depends on intimacy, enclosure and the gradual revelation of one scene after another.
I thought it was extraordinarily beautiful. Unfortunately, so did a very large number of other people.
When we visited, the garden was so crowded that it was difficult to experience many of the qualities it was designed to create. Visitor-management measures were already in place, including managed circulation and restrictions on where people could move, but I noticed that some visitors simply ignored them.
It made me wonder whether we sometimes focus too much on how many people a popular place can physically accommodate, rather than how many people can be there while still allowing everyone to pause, observe and enjoy it.
Good visitor management depends on more than signs, barriers and carefully planned circulation. It also depends on people respecting them.
What stayed with me: Beautiful places can become victims of their own success.
Palace and Gardens of Versailles, France
How could I forget Versailles?
I had been looking forward to visiting its gardens for years, and we even joined a guided tour of the Estate of Trianon and its gardens.
Unfortunately, our visit coincided with one of France’s recent heatwaves. The Versailles estate closed early, so we were unable to explore the gardens as fully as planned.
What struck me most in the grand formal gardens close to the château was just how exposed I felt. The vast avenues, clipped hedges, parterres and expanses of gravel were designed for spectacle, procession and long views, not for providing refuge from extreme heat.
Experiencing such a celebrated historic landscape in those conditions made climate change feel anything but abstract.
It also raises a difficult question: How do we adapt culturally significant landscapes to hotter conditions without losing the qualities that make them important in the first place?
I would still happily return to Versailles. I might simply choose spring next time.
What stayed with me: Even the world’s most famous landscapes need to remain comfortable enough for people to experience them.
Le Jardin de Jeanot, La Tessoualle, France
One of the most personal garden visits of the trip was Le Jardin de Jeanot, the private garden of former landscape gardener Jean-Noël Caillaud.
Jean-Noël has been shaping his garden since the 1970s. Across around two hectares, winding paths connect ponds, bridges, structures and framed views, with the garden closely tied to the surrounding bocage landscape.
I was very fortunate to be given a private tour by Jean-Noël himself.
There was one small complication: he spoke entirely in French. That is only fair given we were in France!
So I had to listen very attentively as he explained the garden and the thinking behind it.
What I loved was the sense that this was not a garden designed and then completed. It had evolved alongside its creator over decades. It felt deeply personal, full of accumulated decisions, experiments and discoveries.
There is something rather special about experiencing a place that so clearly reflects one person’s long relationship with a landscape.
What stayed with me: The character that emerges when someone has the time to truly know and shape a place.
Journées de la Rose, Doué-la-Fontaine, France
The French can apparently make even a rose show theatrical.
Doué-la-Fontaine in the Loire Valley is one of France’s great rose-growing centres, and its Journées de la Rose has celebrated the local industry since 1959.
Rather than taking place in a conventional showground, thousands of roses are displayed inside the town’s atmospheric troglodytic caves.
The festival combines commercial rose production, horticultural heritage and floral design, including an international floral art competition in which teams create large installations from roses around an annual theme.
This year’s theme was La Rose et l’Enfance — The Rose and Childhood.
For me, the setting transformed what could have been a conventional horticultural show into something immersive and memorable. It was a wonderful example of how place and storytelling can completely change the way we experience plants. I am not usually much of a rose lover, but even I was captivated by the floral displays.
What stayed with me: Horticulture becomes even more memorable when the setting tells a story too.
Parc Oriental de Maulévrier, France
Near Cholet in western France, the Parc Oriental de Maulévrier is the largest Japanese garden in Europe.
Its landscapes are designed to reveal themselves gradually as you walk, using water, rocks, planting, pathways and structures to create changing scenes and atmospheres.
We happened to visit during Kamiplay, the park’s annual celebration of cosplay.
Suddenly, elaborately costumed characters were appearing amongst the trees, bridges and carefully composed Japanese-inspired landscapes. Rather than feeling completely out of place, they added another layer to the experience.
It was an unexpected meeting between historic garden design and contemporary Japanese popular culture, and a reminder that gardens do not need to remain culturally frozen in the era in which they were created.
They can continue to support new activities, audiences and interpretations.
And yes, the cloud pruning and bonsai were rather impressive too.
What stayed with me: A garden can respect its origins while still allowing contemporary culture to become part of its story.
Park Güell, Barcelona, Spain
Designed by Antoni Gaudí, Park Güell was originally conceived as a residential development inspired by the British garden-city movement.
Gaudí worked closely with the existing landscape, retaining vegetation, using Mediterranean planting and incorporating systems to collect and store rainwater.
I visited during a heatwave, which made me particularly conscious of shade and thermal comfort.
I was therefore struck by the Plaça de la Natura, or Nature Square, which is almost entirely devoid of planting. Standing there in extreme summer heat, we felt very exposed.
Historically, this makes sense. The space was originally designed as the Greek Theatre, an open esplanade for gatherings and performances.
Even so, the experience made me think about how our expectations of public landscapes are changing. As summers become hotter, shade and vegetation are no longer simply desirable additions. Increasingly, they are essential infrastructure for making outdoor spaces comfortable and usable.
And I could not quite get past the irony of calling it Nature Square.
What stayed with me: Designing for beauty and function also means designing for how a place will actually feel on a hot day.
Jardí Botànic de Barcelona, Spain
Set high on Montjuïc, Barcelona’s botanical garden is devoted to plants from the world’s Mediterranean-climate regions: the Mediterranean Basin, California, central Chile, South Africa and southern and south-western Australia.
We visited later in the day, when the heat had eased a little.
I was surprised and delighted to discover a substantial Australian section, with familiar genera including Acacia, Eucalyptus, Melaleuca, Callistemon, Banksia, Grevillea and Hakea.
Seeing Australian vegetation alongside plants from the other Mediterranean regions was a wonderful reminder that very different plant communities have evolved similar ways of coping with hot, dry summers, seasonal rainfall, poor soils and, in some cases, fire.
For Australian gardeners, there is an important lesson here.
Designing resilient gardens does not necessarily mean searching overseas for drought-tolerant plants. Many Australian species are already superbly adapted to conditions that are likely to become increasingly familiar across southern Australia.
Sometimes travelling overseas simply reminds you to look more carefully at what you already have at home.
What stayed with me: Many Australian plants are already exceptionally well adapted to hot, dry summers and Mediterranean-type climates.
Ilnacullin – Garinish Island, Ireland
Before travelling through Ireland, I contacted Irish gardening presenter and writer Kitty Scully, who knows my mum, for suggestions on gardens worth visiting.
I was keen to avoid some of the more formal castle and estate gardens and find places with a slightly different story.
That led us to Garinish Island, or Ilnacullin, in the sheltered waters of Glengarriff Harbour in County Cork.
The island is a wonderful example of how profoundly horticulture can transform a difficult site. When John and Violet Bryce bought it in 1910, it had almost no soil and little protection from Atlantic winds.
Over time, shelter belts were established, soil was built through composting, and a remarkable garden emerged.
Today its mild, humid microclimate supports lush planting, including species from Australia, New Zealand and Africa. The formal walled garden is a highlight, but I was equally taken by the borrowed landscape: verdant hills rising beyond the island and becoming part of the garden itself.
For me, Garinish demonstrated something fundamental: before choosing plants, we can often achieve more by first improving the conditions in which those plants are expected to live.
What stayed with me: Shelter, patience and thoughtful horticulture can completely change what is possible on an exposed site.
St Stephen’s Green, Dublin, Ireland
Sometimes the most interesting thing about a garden is not horticultural at all.
St Stephen’s Green is a nine-hectare Victorian public park in central Dublin. While I enjoyed the landscape, what fascinated me most was discovering its role in the 1916 Easter Rising.
Irish Citizen Army volunteers occupied the Green, erecting barricades and digging trenches before British forces took positions in surrounding buildings.
Today, interpretative signs throughout the park allow visitors to encounter this history in the places where events unfolded.
I thought this was particularly well done.
Instead of separating history from the landscape, the interpretation encourages you to understand the park itself as part of the story. Once I knew what had happened there, I looked at what initially seemed a pleasant Victorian city park quite differently.
Gardens and public landscapes can provide beauty, shade and recreation, but they can also carry memory, identity and contested histories.
What stayed with me: Landscapes can hold history as powerfully as they hold plants.
Hyde Park, London, England
Growing up, I always imagined Hyde Park as the quintessential lush, green English park.
The Hyde Park I encountered this summer looked very different.
After prolonged heat and drought, large areas of lawn had turned completely brown and some trees appeared severely stressed.
It was surprisingly confronting.
We tend to carry fixed ideas about familiar landscapes: English parks are green; their great old trees will always be there; rain will eventually sort everything out.
But landscapes are not static.
Seeing Hyde Park in this condition made me think about how climate change may alter not only the ecology of historic parks, but also their character and our emotional expectations of them.
How do we retain the shade, cooling, recreation and identity provided by these landscapes while adapting their trees, lawns and planting to hotter and drier summers?
It is a question that feels equally relevant back home.
What stayed with me: Even landscapes we think of as permanently green are changing.
St James’s Park, London, England
And then there are the moments you cannot really plan for.
Walking through St James’s Park, I spotted a eucalypt and immediately thought of home.
I could not identify it at the time, although some research since suggests that it may have been a Tasmanian blue gum, Eucalyptus globulus, a species recorded in the park, which would fit with this tree’s mostly smooth barked trunk.
There was something strangely comforting about encountering such a familiar Australian form in the middle of London.
At home, I might have walked past the same tree without giving it much thought. On the other side of the world, it immediately carried associations of Lutruwita / Tasmania.
It reminded me that gardens are not simply collections of plants or designed landscapes. Plants can connect us with places, experiences and memories.
Sometimes one familiar tree is enough to make somewhere foreign feel a little less so.
What stayed with me: Our relationship with plants is emotional as well as practical.
Bringing the ideas home
Travel has a useful way of making us look differently at home.
I came back to Lutruwita / Tasmania thinking even more about shade, shelter, water, plant selection, microclimate and the way people actually experience outdoor spaces.
The climates, cultures and histories of Shanghai, Versailles, Barcelona, Ireland and London are very different from ours. Yet the fundamental design questions are remarkably similar.
- Where will people want to sit?
- Where will they seek shelter?
- How will plants cope with changing conditions?
- What should be preserved?
- What can a landscape tell us about the people who have lived there?
- And perhaps most importantly: what does this particular place need in order to become somewhere people can genuinely enjoy living in?
Those are questions worth asking whether we are designing a famous public garden or simply trying to make a house and garden in Lutruwita / Tasmania work better together.
Perhaps it was a busman’s holiday after all.
À bientôt!
Gabrielle
