Wimpole provides almost a case-book history of English Gardening from 1690 to 1830. The contributions of successive generations were, broadly speaking, five main periods of activity. From 1693 to about 1700, the 2nd Earl of Radnor created an elaborate formal garden, perhaps designed by the Royal London gardeners, London and Wise, to the North of Sir Thomas Chichley's seventeenth century house. This was greatly extended to the South by Charles Bridgeman, working for Lord Harley in the 1720s, with a system of great axial avenues and a series of canalised ponds, woods disposed with serpentine paths leading to 'cabinets', bastions and ha-has similar to those at Stowe.

The naturalisation of the Wimpole landscape was begun with the 1st Earl of Hardwicke who, between 1749 and 1754, employed Robert Greening to grass over the old parterre beds on the north side of the house and it was he who designed the original Walled Garden to the North East of the house (since demolished.) In 1767 Capability Brown was employed by the 2nd Earl of Hardwicke to further naturalise the landscape with belts of trees, turning the fishpond into serpentine lakes and building the Gothic Tower on Johnson's Hill, which was designed years earlier by Sanderson Miller. The last important changes to the landscape were made by Humphry Repton for the 3rd Earl of Hardwicke between 1801 and 1809, further naturalising the landscape. The glasshouses were originally built between 1790-1794 to a design by Sir John Soane, but were demolished by a bomb in November 1941.