Private passions

The British have developed a number of garden styles over the centuries but none more unexpected than the ‘woodland garden’. No one in 1800, when the first rhododendrons were arriving in this country, could possibly have predicted that a sizeable number of large country gardens, situated on acid soil in rolling wooded countryside or in deep valleys, would be filled in the next century or so with the plant riches of the Himalayas and the eastern United States.

But so it has turned out. At Caerhays, Heligan, Lanhydrock, Trebah, Trengwainton, Trewidden and Trewithen in Cornwall, at Leonardslee, Borde Hill and High Beeches in Sussex, at Crarae, Arduaine and Inverewe on the west coast of Scotland (to select just a few which are open to the public), wealthy Victorian gents with time on their hands, energy and a deep desire to do things properly, experimented with the cultivation of imported exotic plants, most particularly species of the vast rhododendron tribe. These had been collected in upland regions and so had a fighting chance of surviving winters in warm and wet districts of the south and west. Rhododendrons jostled for space and their owners’ affections with other acid-loving plants from the same parts of the temperate world, principally camellias and magnolias, although enkianthus, embothrium, kalmia, michelia and pieris also found a place. Since these plants were predominantly spring-flowering, they fitted a lifestyle which often consisted of the Season in London in early summer, grouse shooting in August, and deerstalking, foxhunting and game-bird shooting through the autumn and winter. Spring was both the critical moment for ericaceous plants, and the time that these gardeners could spare for them.

I saw something of the enduring legacy of those well-to-do plant enthusiasts on a late April visit to Cornwall, where a number of the best gardens have survived intact or been restored, due in part to the iron laws of primogeniture as well as Mrs Thatcher’s tax cuts and, where those have not saved them, thanks to the National Trust.