Exbury Gardens
garden in Hampshire, England, UK

Exbury Gardens is a 200-acre (81 ha) informal woodland garden in Hampshire, England, with large collections of rhododendrons, azaleas and camellias, and is often considered the finest garden of its type in the United Kingdom. Exbury holds the national collection of Nyssa (Tupelo) and Oxydendrum under the National Plant Collection scheme run by the Plant Heritage charity. The gardens are rated Grade II* on the National Register of Historic Parks and Gardens.
Lionel Nathan de Rothschild purchased the Exbury estate in 1919 and soon began creating a garden on an ambitious scale, emulating his father's at Gunnersbury Park in London. Exbury House is a neoclassical mansion which was built around an earlier structure in the 1920s; whilst the gardens are open to the public, the house is not.
Location
Exbury Gardens is situated in the village of Exbury, just to the east of Beaulieu, across the river from Buckler's Hard. It is signposted from Beaulieu and from the A326 Southampton to Fawley road in the New Forest. In the summer, the gardens are served by the New Forest Tour open-top bus service.
The gardens
Features include the Hydrangea Walk, the Rock Garden, Iris Garden, the Sundial Garden, Centenary Garden and Camellia Walk (which takes visitors to a path alongside Beaulieu river and back via the pond). The indoor Five Arrows Gallery has a collection of lachenalias or leopard lilies and orchids.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Exbury Gardens” as garden in Hampshire, England, UK. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q24185. VIAF identifies the subject as 151529263. The Library of Congress control number is nb2008002761. Authority coordinates are 50.799, -1.401. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1919.
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This entry incorporates text from “Exbury Gardens” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.