Alpine gardening with the experts
At Burnby Hall Gardens in Yorkshire, head gardener Ian Murphy and his team are painstakingly restoring their historical rock garden
For the last two years The Rock Garden at Burnby Hall has been the focus of a Lottery-funded project, which has recently seen extensive replanting take place. The aim is to restore it to how its founders would have envisaged it more 100 years ago.
When Major Percy Stewart and his wife Katharine moved into Burnby Hall they renovated the house and overhauled the gardens. In 1910 they decided on a new half-acre rock garden and hired renowned horticulturists Backhouse Nursery of York.
Backhouse built quite a few in this period, though Burnby is one of the few surviving examples of their work.
Over the years since Major Stewart’s death in 1961 the rock garden became overgrown, the formation of the rocks underneath consumed by weeds and shrubbery.
The gardening team at Burnby wanted to restore this key garden feature to its former glory and applied for a Heritage Lottery grant. They received £634,800, which has been used to renovate the rock garden, as well as the garden’s lakes, home to a National Collection of more than 100 varieties of hardy water lilies (Nymphaea), started by Katharine Stewart herself.
The team started from scratch, researching Victorian and Edwardian rock gardens, as well as Backhouse Nurseries themselves, as they held no records or archives of the project. A chance discovery gave them a great insight into the garden – they came across old Backhouse Nursery advertisement literature
extolling the virtues of Burnby, which also catalogued the plants used.
And so the restoration project began in 2016, when head gardener Ian Murphy and his team stripped the garden of all its foliage and weeds. It took eight weeks, with them taking a ‘scorched earth’ approach to the pernicious ground elder and mare’s tail that ravaged the spot. This process revealed the shape of the rock garden, not seen for decades. Though the gardeners usually stick to organic methods, they carried out careful sprayings of glyphosate every couple of months over 18 months as the garden remained fallow.
This year planting began with help from Kevock Garden Plants of Edinburgh to supply around 15,000 plants and 10,000 bulbs. They’re sticking closely to the old plant lists but updating their choices to include modern varieties with RHS AGMs that are freely available and good performers.
They researched renowned 20th century alpine garden writer Reginald Farrer’s work, as well as Clarence Elliott, founder of the Alpine Garden Society, as to what would have been used in those days for authenticity. They even got the local community on board, getting lots of volunteers to help them plant up this autumn.