Famous English gardens visit: Alnwick Garden

Famous English gardens visit: Alnwick Garden

Alnwick Garden is dafinatelly one of the famous English gardens to visit and, according to its noble patron, has so much to offer visitors - especially serious gardeners. Alnwick Garden is a large-scale public garden in England with rich horticultural areas

Famous English gardens visit: Alnwick Garden
 The banks alongside Alnwick Castle are a sea of golden daffodils in spring

Alnwick Garden

Everything about the Alnwick Garden is on a truly grand scale. The 60-acre layout is the Duchess of
Northumberland’s dream of transforming a derelict site, and it draws 800,000 visitors a year. Alnwick Gardens  design by Jacques and Peter Wirzt has so far cost £42 million implement. By raising a further 15
million, the Duchess aims to finish it by 2015. She will then step back and let it be run by a management company. It will have taken her 20 years to complete.

Famous English gardens visit: Alnwick Garden

‘What I am really interested in is people,’ says the Duchess. ‘The garden would be dead without people. I love to hear children shriek with joy when the water jets hit them. You can build a garden: so what! It’s people that bring it alive. Families with disabled children come here to have fun; schoolchildren learn to grow vegetables and then to cook them. Older folk, who call themselves the Elderberries, come to have their feet pampered!’

Alnwick Garden design

The garden is multi-faceted, embracing art, theatre, music, Tai Chi, martial arts and light displays. Yet behind the spectacle of the central grand cascade or the poison garden, where guides tell grisly tales of deadly plants, there is a rich horticultural seam. The mellow brick walls of the ornamental garden give that feeling of
security and calm that envelops old kitchen gardens. There’s a wide range of perennials to satisfy the keen gardener, set within strong axial lines and formality.

Roses put on growth and bamboo wigwams wait to support emerging delphiniums by the rill that bisects the ornamental garden. Famous English gardens visit: Alnwick Garden

Echoing the layout of the paradise garden, water spills from a large square tank to ripple over pebble lined rills between box edged borders full of well-labelled planting. Elevated above the paths floats a second layer of formality: pleached crab apples creating a lacy fretwork against the clear northern skies. In spring, their dark pink buds open to blush white flowers, while the geometric beds beneath are massed with tulips, planted each year by the 14-strong garden team under head gardener Trevor Jones. ‘We have a really good working relationship,’ says the Duchess. ‘Trevor makes all the right decisions and keeps his team happy.’

Alnwick Garden plants

‘If summer is given over to children,’ Trevor says, ‘then spring is when serious gardeners come here.’ Choice plants bloom in the ornamental garden: Pasque flower, snowflakes, daffodils, epimediums,
euphorbia and exotic-looking Crown Imperials, shielding their perfect drops of nectar. The paths are edged with Anemone blanda, emerging peony leaves shine in beetroot colours and Clematis alpina scrambles over tall pergolas.

Famous English gardens visit: Alnwick Garden

A delicate erythronium bloom; the blossom of crab apple ‘Red Sentinel’, which adorns the pleached trees that frame geometric beds of flowers in the ornamental garden; Euphorbia polychroma; tulip ‘Mistress’, responsible for the pink waves under the trees in the cherry orchard.

Yet it is on a slope outside the old walled garden that spring is truly epitomised. The breathtaking sight of the cherry orchard in blossom carries an emotional resonance that moves visitors. Its simplicity is key: 300 white-flowered ‘Taihaku’ cherry trees underplanted with 600,000 pink ‘Mistress’ tulips. These two colours are then subtly enhanced by the bronze leaves of the cherries. ‘It is staggeringly beautiful, like falling snowflakes,’ says the Duchess.

The Wirtz original idea was for a wide variety of trees in the Alnwick Garden, but the Duchess felt that a single cultivar would have more impact and magic. ‘I wanted a cherry orchard that would blow you away,’ she explains. ‘Nobody had used ‘Taihaku’ on this scale before.’ Known as the ‘great white cherry,’ the full-flowered yet serene ‘Taihaku’ was presumed extinct in Japan. It was recognised and saved by the great cherry expert Collingwood ‘Cherry’ Ingram from a single tree in Sussex in 1923. Every tree comes from that one specimen. It was reintroduced to Japan in 1932.

Famous English gardens visit: Alnwick Garden

Pleached crab apple trees Malus x robusta

‘Red Sentinel’ form a blossoming enclosure around beds of tulips.

Awarded an Award of Garden Merit by the RHS in 1993, ‘Taihaku’ is a tree that needs shelter and deep, well-drained soil, both of which it has at Alnwick Garden, on an eastfacing slope. The branches fan out at the top in a spreading canopy. Grafted and grown in Holland, the 15-year-old trees took a couple of years to settle in, and are now doing splendidly. The Duchess also chose the ‘Mistress’ tulips, whose flowering time coincides with the cherry blossom.

The residents of the dovecotes in the ornamental garden hang out.
Clematis macropetala adorns a curving gazebo.

And this may be the last year to see this particular combination, as the orchard will probably in future years be managed for wildflowers and camassias in grass. ‘When the orchard was planted in the Alnwick Garden, people began to sponsor trees in memory of births, deaths and anniversaries,’ the Duchess explains. ‘At our first dedication ceremony, everybody had lanterns, and there was a great swell of feeling. Many people stopped me. They were crying and thanking me, though I couldn’t have done it without their sponsoring the trees. The way the orchard has come to mean something is like so many things here; things have happened that I never dreamed would happen.’ She feels that she has been the catalyst for the creation of the garden, which the community has then taken to their hearts and made their own.

Alnwick is a contemporary garden with modern classics including fascinating fountains, a treehouse and a bamboo labyrinth.

Spending time in an English garden in her own childhood (her mother Lady Buchan-Hepburn owns Kailzie garden near Peebles) gave the Duchess her love of plants. ‘My mother was always in the garden. If I wanted to ask her anything, I would have to talk to her while she was transplanting snowdrops. I don’t have time to garden now, but when I was first married, I loved my greenhouse, with my cup of tea and my radio.’

Getting children to appreciate gardens is one of her main motivations. It goes beyond their excitement at playing around the water sculptures or fountains, to nurturing a feeling for plants. This year, she has planted thousands of daffodils on a grassy bank by the Alnwick castle so that children can pick them. Provided with ribbons and gift tags, they can present bunches to their mothers on Mother’s Day. It’s a true spring moment, and could foster a love of gardens way into the future.

Alnwick Garden gardening notes

FLOWERING FRAME
The pleached lacework of ‘Red Sentinel’ crab apples in the ornamental garden is covered with blossom. To maintain the design, the team trims the new shoots back in August, leaving three buds, before tying in new shoots to fill any gaps. The tulips beneath them are replanted every year.

Alnwick Garden gardening notes

GARDEN CHALLENGES

SCALE: A large public garden has unusual logistical problems. Noisy work such as hedgecutting has to be done before visitors arrive, so the gardeners begin at 7am. With no access for tractors, everything has to be bagged up and carried out.


STAND UP STRAIGHT

It takes a team of 12 gardeners 14 weeks to make plant supports throughout the borders. ‘We use supple birch branches,’ says Trevor, ‘which we weave together to make a framework. Even in wet summers, all the plants stay upright. It’s all then shredded to make compost.’

ALNWICK HEAD GARDENER TREVOR’S
TOP SPRING TIPS

􀁌 My favourite area at all times of the year is the

ornamental garden. I particularly like it in winter

and early spring because of the strong structure.

It’s the framework that the garden hangs on. Get

that right and it will always look good.

􀁌􀀀We use Strulch around the delphiniums

and hostas. We find this mulch, which is made

from wheat straw, is too dry for slugs and snails,

so we have no slug damage. It lasts two years

before we dig it in (and it was editor Tamsin’s

top choice in last month’s mulch trials).

􀁌 Compost is essential to the health of the

garden. We can make rough compost in 12 weeks

because we have so much raw material and we

turn it frequently with a front loader. Everything

is returned to the garden it came from.

Alnwick Garden

The Alnwick Garden, Denwick Lane, Alnwick,
Northumberland NE66 1YU.

Open all year - every day in summer. To find out more,
tel: +44 (0)1665 511350 or see the website:
www.alnwickgarden.com


ALSO IN THE ALNWICK CASTLE AREA

While visiting Alnwick, the Duchess also recommends:

􀁌 GARDEN Howick Hall Wild, informal and
beautiful in spring. Alnwick NE66 3LB.Tel: +44
(0)1665 577285. www.howickhallgardens.co.uk

􀁌 NURSERY Stanton Hall Rural nursery with
wide range of stock. Helpful and friendly. Stanton,
Morpeth NE65 8PR. www.stantonhall.co.uk

􀁌 CAFÉ & SHOP The Running Fox Delightful
café with onsite bakery selling artisan breads and
locally sourced products. Felton, Morpeth NE65 9EA.
Tel: +44 (0)1670 787090.

Read all about Alnwick Castle here


PHOTOGRAPHS HOWARD WALKER | WORDS SUSIE WHITE

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