3 Best Sights in The Southeast, England

Wisley is the Royal Horticultural Society's innovative and inspirational 240-acre showpiece, beloved by horticulturalists across this garden-loving country. Both an ornamental and scientific center, it claims to have greater horticultural diversity than any other garden in the world. Highlights include the flower borders and displays in the central area, the rock garden and alpine meadow in spring, and the large and modern conservatories; look out for the giant strelitzia (birds of paradise) plants. There's also an impressive bookstore and a garden center that sells more than 10,000 types of plants. The garden is eight miles northeast of Guildford.

One of the most famous gardens in the world, unpretentiously beautiful and quintessentially English, Sissinghurst rests deep in the Kentish countryside. The gardens, with their many different themed "rooms," were laid out in the 1930s around the remains of part of a moated Tudor castle by writer Vita Sackville-West (one of the Sackvilles of Knole, her childhood home) and her husband, diplomat Harold Nicolson. The relationship was clearly loving but also complicated, as both had a string of extramarital same-sex affairs; Vita, famously, had a decade-long romance with Virginia Woolf.

Climb the tower for a wonderful overview of the gardens—as well as a peek inside Vita's study en route—then descend to see them up close. There's the stunning White Garden, filled with snow-color flowers and silver-gray foliage; the herb and cottage gardens, which showcase Sackville-West's encyclopedic knowledge of plants; and the Delos Garden, which brings a slice of the Mediterranean to the heart of Kent (as well as finally realizing a dream of Vita and Harold's following their visit to Greece in 1935). As well as the gardens, there are woodland and lake walks all around, making it easy to spend a half day or more here.

If you love it all so much you want to stay, you can—the National Trust rents the Priest's House on the property for a minimum stay of three nights; prices start at around £750 and rise to upwards of £1,800 in midsummer. See the National Trust website for details (but be warned, you'll need to book well ahead).

Sissinghurst Castle Garden is 22 miles south of Rochester on the A229, and 16 miles east of Tunbridge Wells on the A262.

Combining a large timber-frame hall with a cottage garden on a grand scale, this place will get your green thumbs twitching. The house dates to 1464 (you can tour a few rooms) and was restored in 1910 by architect Edwin Lutyens, who also designed the garden. From these beginnings, the horticulturist and writer Christopher Lloyd (1921–2006), whose home this was, developed a series of creative, colorful "garden rooms" and a dazzling herbaceous Long Border. The house is 8½ miles northwest of Rye.