Exteriors

Ordinary people living in poor, built-up areas have struggled to find a connection with nature, which is regarded as fundamental to good mental health. Now, two ‘punk horticulturists’ show in a dynamic new book how they and other like-minded urban gardeners are bringing inspiration to the wastelands and forgotten corners of the city

Ilse Ackermann’s picturesque plot in the City of Angels stands apart – in part for the pigs and poultry running about the place, but chiefly thanks to the vibrancy, warmth and dash of the madcap that have resulted from years of diligent DIY

What do you get when an Anglophile architect and heiress collaborate? Tjolöholm Castle, an Arts and Crafts dreamscape with a decidedly Nordic accent and breathtaking views of the Kattegat sea

Croatian outsider artist Emilan Grgurić spent decades creating his own mythological world on Ugljan, an Adriatic island. Now his elderly daughter unveils the concrete enigma

Jade Angeles Fitton seeks out a rare bearded iris – ‘a comma of copper fire’ – at Sissinghurst

Dan Pearson and Huw Morgan traded in their modest Peckham allotment for a sprawling Somerset garden, with an outdoor kitchen that heaves with home-grown produce

Luciano Giubbilei’s epic garden – nicknamed ‘the Field’ – enchants a far corner of the Mallorquin countryside with exotic verdure from across the Mediterranean and Africa

In an idyllic patch of the Kent woods, Matthew Darbyshire and kin have constructed an offbeat country getaway stroke sculpture park for staunch survivalists

It’s prime picking season for fungi – in all their gastronomic, artistic and pop-cultural – as a new book on mushrooms forages far and wide, not only for button-based recipes but also the mysteries and marvels of all things mycological

A nursery owner and a craftsman in Marrakesh have collaborated to build mudhifs, millennia-old straw structures from the Southern Iraq marshlands

Dries van Noten and Patrick Vangheluwe have fostered floral glory far from the catwalk on their 55-acre estate in Lier. Here, the pair bow down to the ultimate creative director: nature itself

The water lilies bred by Joseph Bory de Latour-Marliac inspired the Giverny-dwelling Impressionist’s best-known paintings and have since never fallen out of fashion. Indeed, a recent collaboration between the Latour-Marliac nursery and Dior settles the case

In a curious custom dating back centuries, wells are decorated with biblical, royal and Disney-esque figures

The rugged Jacobean exterior of Glyn Cywarch conceals a minimalist interior transformed by the latest generations of redoubtable Harlech women – and now, it could all be yours