Bloom and doom
Argyll’s formal gardens are a riot of colour as summer approaches... and it’s all down to the Victorians’ love of a very aggresive Chinese incomer
BY every turn of this uphill path, through soft Argyll morning, by the babbling river and as the bees drowse, there are yet more explosions of colour – great avenues of blossom drawing your eyes deep into the spring woodland.
There are magnolias, Chilean lantern trees and (disconcertingly) blue poppies here in Crarae. The birches are in tender leaf, ferns here and there unfurl and the hydrangeas are just thinking about flowering – but, mostly, there are rhododendrons.
I never thought there were so many different varieties. But here there are scores: some dainty azalea types, some midsized shrubs, and not a few magnificent trees, some with leaves as big as my forearm. Their scent intoxicates but the colours dazzle. There are blooms of pure, Himalayan white, of richest cream, of lustrous gold. There are delicate pinks, shrieking scarlets and flaming orange, violet and purple, and beneath those well on in flower, the forest floor is thickly carpeted in petals.
Kyle Renton, 19, my guide – he works here, though had the week off on account of becoming a father – explains a little of the history.
Crarae House – not itself open to the public – is the seat of the Campbells of Succoth and one day, about 1912, Grace, Lady Campbell, gazed from her parlour over the lawns and suddenly thought what a good idea it would be to make something charming of the surrounding woods. ‘So she created this Himalayan glen, basically,’ explains Mr Renton. ‘There had been this big fashion for years for exotic plants, especially from the Far East. You had men like George Forrest and Ernest Wilson going on these great expeditions – and her own nephew, Reginald Farrer, too.’
Farrer was important not only because he found and took home such beauties but because he was an influential writer who, more than anyone, moved British taste away from neurotically neat Victorian formal gardens to something much more resembling nature.
Crarae, with its fertile soil and dramatic ravines and assorted cataracts, was ideal for this approach, and what was begun by Lady Campbell was continued first by her son, Sir George, and then her grandson, Sir Ilay. Since 2002 these 160 beautiful acres, by Furnace on the western shore of Loch Fyne, have been in the hands of the National Trust – and include one of the best collections of rhododendrons in Scotland.
Rhododendrons are not, of course, native to the British Isles. Most hail from what one might roughly call the Himalayas – Kashmir, Nepal, Tibet and south-west China – with an important population, too, in what we used to call French Indochina.
With our mild, moist climate, soft water and acidic soil, and in their hardiness and high salt-resistance, they have taken avidly to Scotland. You have only to glance at tourist postcards or calendars to see how much they are now part of our scenery, especially on the West Coast.
Two years ago the first Argyll and Bute Rhododendron Festival was held, with dozens of glorious gardens open to the public throughout May. Such was its success that it was reprised in 2016 – this year, it’s a national event.
Our favourite Scots blooms are apt to be retiring – the soft snowdrop, the nodding daffodil, the ranks of humble bluebells in the hedgerow.
There is nothing shy or subtle about the rhododendron and, in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, they are seized on as symbolic of the late, sensuous and highly feared Other Woman: ‘Suddenly I saw a clearing in the dark drive ahead, and a patch of sky, and in a moment the dark trees had thinned, the nameless shrubs had disappeared, and on either side of us was a wall of colour, blood-red, reaching far above our heads. We were among the rhododendrons. There was something bewildering, even shocking, about the suddenness of their discovery. The woods had not prepared me for them. They startled me with their crimson faces, massed one upon the other in incredible profusion, showing no leaf, no twig, nothing but the slaughterous red, luscious and fantastic… these were monsters, rearing to the sky, massed like a battalion, too beautiful, I thought, too powerful.’
As we quit Crarae Gardens, Mr Renton draws my attention to the riverbed. It is paved, bank to bank, in immaculate stone flags. ‘Because they were rich,’ he murmurs, ‘they wanted to show off they could afford to do something like that.’
There are 900 species of rhododendron, with more discovered in the wild almost every year and, so far, about 24,000 hybrids.
The Cox family of Glendoick, alone, have developed dozens of new ones especially for Scottish gardens. It seems rather unfortunate that one species has given the whole clan a bad name. Rhododendron ponticum, the woodland rhododendron, was first planted in the 1700s on assorted great estates as it grows very quickly and gives excellent cover for game.
Unfortunately, it is highly invasive, lethal to other plant life (nothing grows beneath it), carries Sudden Oak Death and reproduces industriously. It is illegal to plant ponticum in the wild or to dump it. In Stornoway, hundreds of thousands have been spent eradicating it from the Lews Castle grounds. Folk on Colonsay have been fighting it for years.
It has even been darkly forecast that, if we just ignored it, in but 1,000 years rhododendron ponticum would cover every square foot of the British Isles.
‘It’s too good a life for them here,’ says David Knott of the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh. ‘Nice mild winters, warm wet summers, abundant daylight – it’s far more restricted in the wild.’
He sighs. ‘It’s a problem for us, too, at Benmore – and it’s dreadfully difficult to get rid of.’
Mr Knott is a rhododendron expert and is eager to impress upon me how many different varieties there are.
The first he shows me I would not have clocked as a rhododendron at all, with its tiny leaves and still tinier blooms, a low and apologetic thing.
‘This is rhododendron fastigiatum. It grows at really high altitudes, in south-west China. You’re talking mountains four times the height of Ben Nevis – 15,000ft, 16,000ft – and they’re simply covered in this.’
We walk along to banks of another. ‘This is rhododendron forrestii. It’s named after George Forrest, who discovered it. He really was the Indiana Jones of plant collecting, though he is most famous for the Himalayan blue poppy.’
Born in Falkirk in 1873, Forrest abandoned life as a pharmacist’s apprentice to prospect for gold in Australia, toil on a sheep station and – back home in Scotland – ending up with a job at the Royal Botanic Garden after a chance introduction to Professor Bayley Balfour, who ran it.
In 1904 Balfour recommended Forrest to Arthur Kilpin Bulley, a cotton broker and horticulturist who was mounting an expedition to China. Forrest duly captained it and, over the years, made repeated visits to the Yunnan province, undaunted by its excessively exciting local politics and the occasional massacre.
By the time of his sudden death in 1932, he had made seven expeditions
‘Too beautiful, I thought, too powerful’
‘It’s dreadfully difficult to get rid of’
and brought home some 31,000 plants – including hundreds of different rhododendrons. Mr Knott proudly shows me much more typical plants – ‘our hardy hybrids’. There are great banks of them, in ebullient blossom, and after that a magnificent rhododendron
sinogrande, with its enormous leaves, and a rhododendron calostrotum, which has tiny ones ‘and grows at altitudes of 4,000 to 5,000 metres (13,100 to 16,400ft)’.
Much more familiar are assorted azaleas on a knoll – ‘all azaleas are rhododendrons’ – of the vivid colour and compact build you would enjoy in your own garden.
‘Here we have some “Yak” hybrids,’ says Mr Knott disconcertingly. ‘They’re all derived from Yakushimanum – it’s a wee island off the coast of Japan – and there are many popular strains. Fantastica is one, and someone’s developed varieties named after each of the Seven Dwarfs.’ I am introduced, in turn, to rhododendron
luteum, and wardi – lovely blossoms of buttermilk-yellow – and, in a succession of sultry hothouses, to ‘our tender rhododendrons –
vireya’. These are from places such as Vietnam and Laos, and typically grow at high altitude in equatorial mountains. Some have scaly leaves, for added sun protection.
One variety, ericoides, is extraordinarily like heather. ‘This is the biggest vireya collection in the world,’ says Mr Knott happily. ‘It dates back to the 1960s.’
Inveraray Castle’s garden is a measured Victorian affair with far less charm than Crarae. Though there are magnificent rhododendrons, hardly anything is labelled.
The most interesting things are trees planted by celebrities of their day – William Gladstone, David Livingstone, Queen Victoria – and the Cursed Millstone of Blar an Buie, which we dare not touch.
Ardkinglas, near the top of Loch Fyne on the Cowal side, is much more promising as there are two gardens – a woodland one open all year round and the Ladies’ Garden by the Big House itself which is open only for the duration of the Scottish Rhododendron Festival.
There are many splendid rhododendrons in the Ardkinglas Woodland – beautifully perfumed loderi varieties and some gorgeous red hybrids. But it is most famous for its ‘Champion Trees’ – huge conifers, one of which is thought to be the tallest tree in the British Isles and a silver fir which, for sheer girth, is the biggest in all Europe.
But where is the Ladies’ Garden? There is no indication of it and we retreat to a garden centre by the famous Loch Fyne Oyster Bar for directions. We return and defiantly bowl up the long drive, past signs saying ‘private’, ‘no unauthorised vehicles’ and ‘weak bridge’, winding through the woods for what feels like an age until, suddenly, the trees fall away and we are crunching up an expanse of gravel to Ardkinglas House.
It feels strangely familiar. (I later learn it was a central location for BBC Scotland’s dramatisation of The Crow Road.) Friendly children leave a tree-swing and direct us to the porch, where we leave money in an honesty box and borrow a laminated leaflet to direct us.
This proves to be one of the most delightful gardens in Scotland, balancing perfectly elements of wilderness and formality.
Though long associated with the Noble family (the late Michael Noble, a past squire, was Secretary of State for Scotland in the early Sixties) Ardkinglas used to belong to the Callanders, whose line ended, in late Victorian times, in two ‘intermittently insane’ brothers. (They used to sail out in rival galleons and fire at each other with live, loaded cannon.) Today’s Ardkinglas House was built, to the design of Sir Robert Lorimer between May 1906 and August 1907, with practically all the materials being delivered by sea.
Sir Andrew Noble from Newcastle, who had made a fortune in armaments, was typical of the industrial nouveau riche who reinvented themselves as Highland lairds in this era – and Ardkinglas was never more than his summer holiday home. It now belongs to his great-great-grandson, the architect David Sumsion.
A happy newt plays in a cheerful fountain, topped by a stone mermaid whom, apparently, a late Lady Noble thought far too buxom. By curious coincidence it was in direct line of sight from her husband’s study.
There are dozens of glorious azaleas, two splendid old sycamores and a grove of Japanese maples. By what one suspects is an artificial loch, ‘the Caspian’, we catch some dreaded rhododendron ponticum, though this ‘is gradually being brought under control’.
Had we but time, there are many more Argyll and Bute gardens open in celebration of rhododendrons. But we have had a good day – one of wet sun, passing showers and peeping rainbows, and everywhere and in wanton blossom the rhododendrons, leathery and green and in the damp determination of a Highland spring.
‘Varieties named after the Seven Dwarfs’