Island sanctuary ready to start the next chapter in its colourful history
Once more than 50 people worked on the Achamore Estate on the Isle of Gigha. Now a community trust battles to maintain its magnificent grounds and gardens, write Jackie Bennett and Richard Hanson
Just 5 kilometres/3 miles from the Scottish mainland, across the Sound of Gigha, a small ‘Lochclass’ ferry takes a few cars and passengers each day to a narrow island that lies parallel to the peninsula of Kintyre.
On a fine day, you can clearly see the mountains of its neighbours: the Paps of Jura to the west, Goat Fell on Arran to the east and sometimes Beinn Mhòr on Mull, 80 kilometres/ 50 miles to the north.
Three factors make Gigha an ideal place to make a garden: its mild winters; the relatively low hills; and its lower rainfall – one-third to a half of the amount that falls on the higher lands of Kintyre and Arran. The Vikings named it ‘The Good Isle’.
It does, however, suffer from prevailing south-westerly winds and with no land masses to stop their force they can be strong. The soil is naturally very acid loam, but a long history of cultivation and grazing of small dairy herds has meant that where there should be only gorse, there are green pastures, small arable fields and woodlands.
Gigha has been on the horticultural map since Lt-col. James Horlick (of the malted milk drinks company) bought the island in 1944, mainly to house his growing collection of temperate plants and, in particular, his rhododendrons. According to the locals, Horlick arrived on Gigha after a rocky boat ride from Islay, where he had been looking for a small estate to start his garden. He climbed off the tiny wooden ferry, lost his footing and claimed that he had ‘slipped and fallen in love with Gigha’.
The house he chose to live in was Achamore, which had been remodelled in the first decades of the 20th century by a team of architects that included Charles Rennie Mackintosh – then a young draughtsman working for the firm of Honeyman & Keppie in Glasgow and who had a hand in the Arts & Crafts interiors. Achamore House had everything a 20th century country gentleman could want: a 0.8 hectare/2 acre walled garden, carriage rides, terraced lawns and, most importantly, hectares of woodland, which could shelter his plants from the winds.
The Horlick years
Horlick was not just a collector of interesting plants, he also bred around 48 rhododendron cultivars of his own, many of which have been identified as still growing at the gardens.
He recognised that within the gardens he could create a series of microclimates suitable for growing plants, which would be impossible at his other houses in Berkshire and Oxfordshire. He designed each garden specifically to hold individual groups of plants in little ‘groves’, using the existing trees and vegetation as protection. He was aided in this by Kitty Lloyd Jones, whom Horlick described as a ‘professional lady gardener’, perhaps not giving her full credit for her involvement in Achamore Gardens. In fact, she helped him to locate the garden and then lived and worked there intermittently from 1944 to 1955. She probably had a personal relationship with Horlick and certainly helped in the design of the estimated 100 individual garden spaces created there – some now lost within the encroaching woodland.
Each one of these garden spaces celebrated either a particular group of temperate plants or was named after people that Horlick knew. (Achamore’s long-standing head gardener, Malcolm Allan, and Horlick’s friend George Taylor both have areas of the garden named after them.)
According to one of the gardeners who worked there in the late 1960s, Horlick would come into the garden and shout ‘Has anyone seen Colonel Rogers?’ referring to the pink rhododendron of that name. The only way to find your way about was to learn the names and locations of the plants.
Horlick ran a staff of eight to ten gardeners, with two allocated to the walled vegetable garden and glasshouses.
Malcolm Macneill, who joined the garden staff as a 15-year-old boy in 1958 under head gardener Malcolm Allan, remembers air layering the rhododendrons and then – in the years before Gigha had a regular ferry crossing – he would travel with the precious packages on a lobster boat to Tarbert on the Kintyre peninsula. Here they were stored in a boat shed overnight before being transported by small fishing crafts to other gardens across Scotland – Glendoick, Crarae, Ardkinglas, Colonsay House, Inverewe, Lochranza and Brodick Castle.
Horlick, who became a baronet in 1958, knew the importance of his collections and the network he had initiated.
In 1962, he donated a collection of his plants to the National Trust for Scotland, as well as the sum of £25,000 to be used for propagating and maintaining the living plants in good order.
He wanted to ensure that, after his death, the fund was used to encourage the public to enjoy the garden in every possible way and to guard against the collection having to be removed from the Isle of Gigha. Horlick was awarded the Victoria Medal of Honour by the RHS in 1963, for his work on rhododendron breeding and education. Achamore House and its grounds and gardens on Gigha, above; authors Jackie Bennett and Richard Hanson, below A new dawn
For the people of Gigha, Achamore Gardens are not a separate entity – they are part of what makes Gigha special and are a huge part of their heritage and history. Many of the families have memories of growing up there, playing there and working there. There is a general feeling that Achamore is not just ‘Horlick’s Garden’ – it is a central part of the island’s history and of the story of the people. But the days when there were up to 50 workers on the estate is in the past; a new model has to be found – one that will work for the future.
Horlick died in 1972. Over the following three decades, Gigha changed hands several times with consequent variable attention being paid to the gardens. Then, in March 2002, the 170 islanders were successful in a
The other challenge is the sheer number of trees outgrowing their allotted space