Magical blooms
A tour of the magnificent gardens in Scotland and the south of England makes for a wealth of wonderful memories
A tour from the south of England to Scotland wraps up Steve Whysall’s garden tour across the pond.
Wow, what a week! I’ve just travelled from the south of England to Scotland, visiting great gardens on the way; from the iconic Sissinghurst and Great Dixter in the south to Chatsworth, Haddon Hall and Alnwick in the north. It has been a blur of beauty from beginning to end. Today, I am back in my own garden, sorting out what has been getting out of hand over the last month while I led a garden tour from Amsterdam to Bruges to London and on to Edinburgh and Glasgow, visiting classic garden after garden all the way. It has been a brilliant experience. I have returned with more insights than I can put down in words here today, but I will be drawing on the wealth of images and ideas I collected for months to come. Starting out in the south of England this week, I took my group to the garden county of Kent, where the hops are grown. We started out by visiting two of the most famous gardens in the world – Vita Sackville West’s beautiful multiroomed castle garden at Sissinghurst and Christopher Lloyd’s romantic hallhouse garden with its fabulous sunken garden and immaculately clipped yews. Was it too ambitious to see both gardens in a single day? Yes, of course. I concede it was a little disrespectful. But it is what we had to do. It was made possible with a stopover for lunch at the beautiful village of Tenterden. What a magnificent garden Sissinghurst is. Sackville- West really understood how to target the emotions by framing views between clipped hedges and positioning statues in strategic places guaranteed to evoke a rapturous response. The garden is the definition of elegance and refinement. Colours have been carefully separated into key areas and combined with artistic precision. The overwhelming feeling through the garden is one of style and sophistication. The same could be said of Great Dixter, although the garden is far less formal. I adored the casual, intelligent planting where many plants had been allowed to freely seed themselves and later edited to perfection. When Lloyd’s father, who made his fortune from printing, bought the 15th century hall- house, he was told by his good friend, architect Edwin Lutyens, that he had taken on more than he could handle. Lutyens helped make the house a livable place. Before leaving he asked: “Is there anything else I can do for you?” To which, Lloyd’s father said, “A garden would be nice.” Which is how the garden ended up with such superb stone landscaping.
All these memories I will now carry
with me as inspiration for garden stories for the coming years
From Kent, I popped into the 300- acre Kew Botanical Garden on the outskirts of London. After looking around the historic glass houses, I wandered through the charming bluebell woods, walked the magnificent Syon Vista and into the fabulous alpine garden and plant family borders. It was exhausting to see it all, so I was grateful for a yummy cream tea in the Orangery at the end. From Oxford, I went to Hatfield House, the place where Queen Elizabeth I was sitting under a tree when she was told she had become queen. I was thrilled by the fabulous freeflowing meadow gardens with simple mowed paths. And the graceful formal gardens, full of clipped boxwood and perennials, were a knockout. In Oxford, after a visit to Christ Church, I stopped in at my famous haunt, the Bird and Baby pub, for a pint in the spot where my favourite authors, C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, sat as part of the Inklings reading their works to one another. Out of Oxford, I trotted up to Rousham to see the classic 18th century landscape designed by William Kent. The flower borders were beautiful, but I most enjoyed the countryside gardens with the rustic water- rills running through them. It was like stepping back into the 1700s. This is a landscape that has influenced students of garden design for years. It was exciting to experience it for myself. At nearby Upton House, it was another pleasure to see the bank of giant cedars of Lebanon, which were planted in the 1700s by someone who knew he would never see them at maturity. It was an equally thrilling to walk down the central lawn and suddenly see the terrace gardens drop down in front of me out of nowhere as if by magic. And, then, just as inspiring to see the house, large and imposing as it is, totally disappear from view as I slowly descend through the terraces to the lake below. From Oxford, I moved up through the counties of Warwickshire and Staffordshire into Derbyshire to visit two exceptional gardens at Haddon Hall and Chatsworth House. Chatsworth House, one of England’s most famous stately homes, has a sprawling, formal garden covering more than 100 acres. It was originally conceived as the English challenge to Versailles. Today, the massive formal layout still exists and is just as impressive as it was back in the 18th century when Lancelot “Capability” Brown reworked the park areas. The Cascade, a series of waterfalls running down a hillside near the house, is still one of the most impressive features. The Emperor fountain, which throws a jet of water more than 150 feet into the air, is another amazing sight along with the gigantic rock garden and superb Serpentine hedge walk. Haddon Hall was a totally different experience. Smaller and much more intimate, Haddon has some of the most exquisite wall- plantings I have ever seen, particularly old- garden roses trained to hug weathered stone walls below medieval windows. From York, I went to the Royal Horticultural Society’s northern test garden at Harlow Carr, which turned out to be a charming woodland full of giant rhododendrons and mass plantings of shade perennials, such as rogersia, candelabra primulas, blue poppies and confident drifts of petasites. From York, I moved farther north to Alnwick to see the garden created by the Duchess of Northumberland. Designed by Belgian father- and- son team Jacques and Peter Wirtz, the garden was massively upgraded in the 1990s to create a new, contemporary landscape that would attract tourists and generate revenue for the local economy. When it officially opened in 2001, it was predicted that the garden would probably attract about 67,000 people and create full- time employment for 20 people. It has far exceeded expectations, drawing more than 800,000 people a year and creating employment for more than 100 people and pumping more than $ 70 million a year into the local economy. Today it draws more tourists than any other garden in England, with the exception of Kew and Wisley. On the way to Alnwick, I stopped and walked along stretch of Hadrian’s Wall, which is surprisingly not along the Scottish border, but clearly quite a few miles south. The first thing you see on entering Alnwick is a spectacular Grand Cascade, a massive water feature with shooting water and a series of waterfalls that tumble evenly down the steep slope opposite. Running up the hill either side are beautiful tunnels of hornbeam with windows framing the spouting water. It was Wirtz’s idea to use water as a connecting element to unite all the key areas of the site, such as the cherry orchard and popular Poison Garden, which features a wide range of poisonous plants. From Alnwick, I crossed the border into Scotland to visit Dawyck Garden, the arboretum wing of the Edinburgh Botanic Garden. To reach it, I travelled through an extraordinarily picturesque landscape of green hills dotted with sheep and criss- crossed the River Tweed a few times. Dawyck felt like a lost paradise of trees, a place that one day we may all beg to walk around to know what an ancient woodland world felt like. From Dawyck, I finally made it into Edinburgh, where I got to visit for the first time the botanical garden that I had heard so much about for years. It came as no surprise to find in the heart of the garden a plea for a greater awareness for environmental sensitivity, not to mention an amazing display of blue poppies and a garden celebrating diversity by planting of a vast range of plants, both common and rare. All these memories I will now carry with me as inspiration for garden stories for the coming years.