Four decades in one day as castle gardener grows for the 2070s
Your typical planter might plan a few weeks or months in advance. But decades? Agnes Stevenson meets Iain Crisp, forwardthinking head gardener at Dunrobin Castle
Autumn is a funny time in the garden. On the one hand you find yourself immersed in tidying up after the exuberance of summer while, on the other, you are making plans for the following year, deciding what to plant for a succession of colour and sowing sweet peas to overwinter for an early show.
It is a busy season but however much you’ve got on your hands, I imagine it isn’t as much as Iain Crisp, head gardener at Dunrobin Castle in Sutherland, who is just about to start lifting, washing, drying and storing almost 500 dahlias.
After that he’ll be planting 1,500 tulip bulbs and almost as many hyacinths and he’ll be carefully nurturing the dozens of pleiones, sometimes called “windowsill orchids”, which will be used to decorate the castle in spring.
He said: “Pleiones have an Edwardian feel to them, which makes them perfect for indoor display at Dunrobin.”
While some visitors suggest that gardeners such as Crisp and his team can hang up their boots until spring, that couldn’t be further from the truth.
He said: “We count down the days until the castle closes at the end of October so that we can get on with all the tasks, such as tree work and hedging, that can’t be done when there are people in the gardens.”
One of his first jobs this month was to repair areas of grass that had become bare under the feet of more than 100,000 visitors.
He said: “The weather has been so mild that the grass seed we have just sown is actually germinating. Our winters have been getting less harsh in recent years but that’s not to say that we couldn’t get a cold snap that would take us all by surprise.”
Crisp is doing what we all do in our gardens, albeit on a much
larger scale but there’s the added pressure of knowing that what he and his team do now will be viewed by thousands of people every day while the castle is open.
He said: “We’ve got an area in the middle of the garden where old trees were removed, which we’ve been cultivating as a meadow, but some people didn’t like how this looked later in the season.
“So to give this area greater formality we will be planting 30 topiary hornbeams, which will form a temporary feature for 50 years until the young trees that we are also planting are large enough to take over.”
My idea of “temporary” is seasonal bedding or annual flowers but, in Scotland’s historic gardens, professionals like Crisp are planning at least half a century ahead.
Maybe we should all take a bit of a long view of our own gardens, planting things that we can watch flourish and that will still be giving pleasure 50 years from now.