NORTH BY NORTH-EAST
Dunbeath Castle gardens sit atop an exposed Caithness cliff
‘ The brief was simple: the bones of the layout were to remain but the seasons were to be extended’
It is 4pm and the midsummer sun is high in a cloudless sky above the south-east-facing walled garden at Dunbeath Castle. At the top of the slope in Claire and Tertius Murray Thriepland’s flower-filled garden in Caithness, 20 miles south of Wick, head-gardener Neil Milman unfolds a small picnic table and covers it with a red gingham tablecloth just in front of a Victorian glasshouse filled with pelargoniums and begonias. Under-gardener Stephen Shearer brings tea in a blue enamel pot. As we discuss this magnificent garden, where Neil has worked for ten years, Claire arrives with a plate of cakes. It is an idyllic moment.
Meanwhile, photographer Angus Blackburn is up a stepladder leaning perilously over one of the many hedges that act as internal windbreaks, capturing one last shot of the magnificent white-harled castle. Perched on the edge of a 50ft cliff overlooking the North Sea, the building stands in sharp contrast to the deep blue sea and sky.
Equally impressive, on arrival, is the view down the sunken ‘ keyhole’ drive that slices between steep banks, each flanked by symmetrical walled gardens. Designed by renowned Edinburgh architect David Bryce in the 1850s when he was commissioned to redesign t he 14th-century castle, t he drive allows the castle view to expand until the whole building fills the keyhole.
On moving to Dunbeath in 1997, the couple enlisted the help of garden designer Xa Tollemache, whose garden at Helmingham Hall in Suffolk was ‘pretty much an ideal’. The brief was simple: the bones of the existing layout were to remain but the seasons were to be extended and the garden was to be given more height and structure with the addition of different ‘rooms’. Space was to be left within the design for Claire to introduce her own ideas as her knowledge increased.
The result is a symmetrical design consisting of eight rooms laid out on either side of the main path now subdivided horizontally. Each connecting room was developed with a
different theme. Height, shape and vital wind protection comes from the different hedges that enclose the spaces: deep red flowering Fuchsia magellanica, Rosa mundi, R rugosa alba, and evergreen, pink-flowering Escallonia ‘Apple Blossom’. ‘ The winter winds blow so hard you can hardly stand upright to walk out of the front door,’ says Claire.
Using the focal point of a sculpture, a box circle or a cordon of step-over apple trees, the rooms are packed with pink and apricot roses, delphiniums, creamy lupins, tepees of sweet peas, foxgloves set against the silver foliage of Weeping Pear, Pyrus salicifolia; or contrasted with the bronze foliage of Dahlia ‘Bishop of Llandaff ’.
The cutting garden is packed with pale yellow verbascum, eryngium, fragrant Rosa ‘Chandos Beauty’ (which lasts well in a vase), plus tall yellow rudbeckia and different dahlias. Elsewhere, artichoke beds underplanted with alliums and mixed with white dahlias are a reminder of the garden’s productive past. Nowadays, beds of pink-rimmed ornamental cabbages are all that remain of attempts to grow vegetables, while experiments with soft fruit also failed: the growing season was just too short.
The mirror planting in the central border, which Neil Milman ‘tries to keep to as much as possible’, features a soft summery palette with tall stands of delphiniums, purple Campanula lactiflora, dark-stemmed Thalictrum ‘Elin’, white Astilbe ‘Deutschland’, hostas and dianthus and long-flowering Filipendula purpurea ‘Elegans’ with its attractive buds and Kniphofia ‘Ice Queen’.
If you turn left through the lower wooden gate, walk down the side of the steep bank that frames the drive and back up the other side, a gate leads you into the east garden. Here, the informal layout of water features, mounds and pergolas take as their theme the original laundry room situated at the top.
The first project was the creation of a wide, stone-edged rill punctuated with fountains made from the disused Caithness flagstone water tanks that run horizontally across the space. The water theme, which Claire, with an amused nod to the vast expanse of North Sea, describes as ‘Tertius’s folly’, continues with a pond overlooked by a Japanese-style pergola. Here there are bog-loving plants such as Stipa gigantea, Libertia ixioides, crocosmia, New Zealand flax, Phormium tenax and Primula florindae. Tall waves of pampas grass and Carex buchananii help filter the wind. Reached up a flight of wooden steps, the mound with its sitouterie takes advantage of sea views and also gives the opportunity to observe t he robot mower, an enviable introduction. Like everything at Dunbeath, it is perfection.