Outdoors & Nature

Inner Temple Garden

The garden where Shakespeare has the Wars of the Roses begin, with a gardener on the payroll since 1307.

GardensFree

The Inn's archives record a gardener appointed here in 1307, and there was a garden on the ground before the Inn itself. The medieval records describe an orchard; by the fourteenth century they mention its roses often enough that Shakespeare could set the scene here in which Richard Plantagenet and John Beaufort pick a white rose and a red one and start a civil war.

What you see is mostly Victorian. A formal layout of 1591 was replaced in the early eighteenth century by an enclosed Dutch design of three rectangular lawns, and then in 1870 Joseph Bazalgette's Victoria Embankment cut the garden off from the Thames it had always run down to - the wall, railings and carriage gates along the southern edge are his, designed to match. The ground lost its river and gained the land reclaimed to build the Embankment on. Robert Marnock, who had made the Sheffield Botanical Gardens and laid out Regent's Park, then planted the two lines of plane trees that still stand either side of the Broad Walk, planes being the tree that best survived the soot.

That soot is also why the Inn became a flower show ground: it started an annual chrysanthemum show, and from 1888 the Royal Horticultural Society held its Spring Flower Show here every year until 1911. Half past twelve until three, weekdays.

Where

Crown Office Row, Inner Temple, EC4Y 7HL

Nearest station

Temple · 4 min walk

Hours

Hours from the page that lists them, checked 14 September 2026.

Closed on bank holidays, and sometimes in high winds, for private functions or for maintenance - the garden's own Instagram posts closures. There are several open days a year.

NearbyOutdoors & Nature

• The Inns of Court garden walk6 min walk
• Lincoln's Inn Gardens8 min walk
• Lincoln's Inn Fields9 min walk

NearbyOther Categories

• Inner TemplePower & Politics1 min walk
• Middle TemplePower & Politics2 min walk
• Temple ChurchPerformance venues2 min walk

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