A quick note: this post contains affiliate links. If you book through one of them we may earn a small commission, at no extra cost to you — it helps keep the Rant going.

Every gardener I know keeps a mental list of places they’d cross an ocean to see. Mine has two cities pinned to the top, and they sit on opposite sides of the Atlantic. London, for the obvious reasons — centuries of horticultural obsession packed into a single, damp, glorious city. And New York, for the less obvious ones: a place most people picture as all concrete and yellow cabs, which turns out to hide some of the most ambitious public planting in the world. Do them back to back and you get a proper education in two very different ideas of what a garden is for.

I finally did the trip as a loop — fly over, a week of English gardens, then straight across to New York for a long weekend before flying home. Here’s the case for doing the same, and how to make the hop between the two without it eating your whole budget.

London: Where Gardening Is a National Sport

You could spend a fortnight in and around London and never run out of gardens. Kew is the headline act, and rightly so — the Palm House alone is worth the airfare — but the real joy is how many world-class gardens sit within an easy train ride. Wisley for the plantsman’s pilgrimage, Sissinghurst for Vita Sackville-West’s white garden, Great Dixter for Christopher Lloyd’s gleeful rule-breaking. If your timing lines up with late May, the Chelsea Flower Show is the closest thing gardening has to a Super Bowl, though you’ll want tickets months ahead.

What strikes an American gardener first is the confidence of it — the clipped yew, the deep herbaceous borders, the willingness to let a single perfect lawn just be a lawn. Bring a notebook. You will steal ideas.

New York: The Green City Hiding in Plain Sight

Then you cross the ocean and the whole vocabulary changes. New York’s gardens are scrappier, more public, and often more inventive precisely because space is so scarce. The New York Botanical Garden up in the Bronx is a genuine rival to Kew — 250 acres, an old-growth forest in the middle of the city, and a glasshouse that will stop you in your tracks. Down in Brooklyn, the Botanic Garden’s cherry esplanade in spring is a event unto itself.

But the most New York thing of all is the High Line: a derelict elevated railway replanted by Piet Oudolf into a mile-and-a-half ribbon of naturalistic meadow, thirty feet above the traffic. It’s the single most influential piece of planting design of the last twenty years, and you can walk the whole thing for free. Add the Conservatory Garden in Central Park and you have a weekend that quietly rearranges your idea of what an urban garden can do.

Making the Hop: Flying Between London and New York

The one genuinely great thing about pairing these two cities is that the route between them is one of the most competitive in the world, which means it’s usually one of the best-value long-hauls you can book. I flew the London–New York leg with Air France (via their hub, which also opens up a stopover in Paris if you want to bolt a third garden city onto the trip), and it was the easy part of the whole itinerary.

If you’re pricing it out, start here: Flights London – New York. Booking the transatlantic leg well ahead — and staying flexible on dates — is where most of the savings live, so it’s worth checking the route early even if the rest of your plans are still loose.

When to Go (a Gardener’s Calendar)

Timing is everything, and the two cities peak at slightly different moments:

• Late May to June — prime English garden season, and Chelsea Flower Show. This is the window if London is the priority.
• September to mid-October — New York’s best-kept secret. The light softens, the crowds thin, and the fall color in the Bronx and Central Park is spectacular.
• April — if you want cherry blossom at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, though it’s a gamble on the exact week.

My honest advice: build the trip around whichever city you care about most, then treat the other as the bonus. A late-spring London week with a New York tail end is hard to beat.

The gardens will still be there whenever you go. The flight is the part worth sorting first — once that’s booked, everything else is just deciding which borders to stand in front of. When you’re ready, have a look at Flights London – New York and start building the itinerary around it.

Photos via Pexels: English garden by Neville Hawkins; London garden pond by Stephan Leuzinger; New York park by Mohammed Abubakr; airplane window by Alex Azabache.