I’ve just had the pleasure of lecturing at the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh to the students doing a Diploma in Garden History. As part of my reward I was invited to go on a trip with them to Drummond Castle in Perthshire.

As the introductory notes for the visit said “Nothing quite prepares you for the breath-taking view that you first encounter after passing through the small gate to one side of the Tower House.”

That’s an understatement if ever there was one.  Like most people I’ve experienced surprise views in different gardens all over the place but this one at Drummond has to be amongst the most extraordinary I’ve ever encountered.

As usual the photos are mine unless otherwise acknowledged

The visit started well with a drive through magnificent countryside before turning in through a set of impressive gates which led to an even more impressive beech avenue about a mile-and-a-half in length and still much as described a visitor in 1874.

” In many places the road has been cut through solid rock, and these cuttings have become entirely clothed with Mosses and Lichens of olive, grey, orange, and creamy tints, forming a soft velvet mantle of many colours, and producing a most charming effect. ln some places …between the ancient trunks sparkling glimpses are obtained of a picturesque lake.”  The avenue was ” virtually destroyed” in a storm in 1892 with “Oaks and Beeches, centuries old, being either broken or uprooted.” but clearly rapidly replanted and now absolutely magnificent again.

The Tower House looms over the approach to the castle.  It dates from about 1490 and  was built byJohn, the first Lord Drummond  on a steep rocky ridge overlooking the valley of the Drummond Burn. Now it stands sentinel guarding the entry to  a courtyard with the  later castle buildings in front and  completely open on the southern side. As a visitor in 1854 remarked “the spectator therefore obtains from this point a complete bird’s-eye view of the whole  garden; its unique plan, decorations, and mode of planting being taken in at a glance ; while the richly-wooded hill, which rises rapidly to the south, forms a suitable background.”  The garden is some 80 feet below in the valley and reached via a steep terraced slope.

 

The real story of the garden begins with John Drummond, 2nd Earl of Perth (1588–1662) who was a Privy Councillor to both James I [VI in Scotland]  and Charles I. His estate was, he wrote, “but small, yet with the help of friends and honest mannagerie, it proved better than expected.”   It might have been modest in some senses but it was anything but that  in others.  The earl not only added another Renaissance-style block to the castle building but also laid out the first terraced garden below the castle in the 1630s.

Much of the building  work was carried out by John Milne, master mason to Charles I, who also built the extraordinary obelisk sundial  which  still stands in the middle of the garden.For more on the sundial see this YouTube video.

Unfortunately there is no detail or description of what the garden was actually like, so at first impression  today’s garden can be thought of as  a re-imagining of how an early 17thc high status Scottish garden might have appeared.  But it’s not quite  as simple as that since the garden had already been re-imagined about 200 years ago, and so it’s actually re-imagining of  a re-imagining.

The Drummonds were royalists and the castle was  sacked by Cromwell’s  army  in 1653, during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, and the family fined.  When the 4th earl succeeded in 1675 it looked  for a while as if things were looking up again. He was in favour at court and held high government office. He began to remake the estate, and one of the gardeners he employed was John Reid, who wrote The Scots Gard’ner, the first  book specifically about gardening in Scotland that was  published in 1683.

The earl is also credited with planning and beginning to plant the  approach avenue which was intended to stretch to Perth, some 20 miles away.  He didn’t complete the task because he was a staunch supporter of James II [VII of Scotland]and  imprisoned following the Glorious Revolution that deposed James and put William III on the throne. After his release he went into exile with James at his court at St Germain, and was rewarded by being made Duke rather than earl of Perth.

The family continued to support the Stuart cause and  the 2nd Duke’s involvement in the 1715 Jacobite Rising meant that there was little maintenance or estate work carried out, until his son, the 3rd Duke, returned to Scotland. A contemporary ballad describes the gardens as being full of “evergreens and flowers…and the waterworks are a’ let on..”  implying that there plenty of fountains and other waterworks in place.  Loyalty to the Stuarts meant that  they supported Bonnie Prince Charlie in his uprising in 1745 and had their estates confiscated as a result.  Part of the castle was demolished to prevent an English garrison being quartered there and I think we can safely assume that  the formal gardens were abandoned.

Forty years later, in 1785,  the estate was returned to James Drummond but by then any surviving formal gardens would have been out of fashion and a wilder more romantic landscape was required. A nearby valley with an existing settlement  was flooded to form the Pond of Drummond, a shallow lake over 100 acres in size, which was soon described as “perhaps the finest sheet of artificial water in Scotland.”  with “its further shore being beautifully fringed with wood, and rocky cliffs.“

Drummond was inherited by Jame’s daughter Clementina.   In 1807  she married Peter Burrell, who later succeeded to the Grimsthorpe Castle estate in Lincolnshire, and the title of Baron Willoughby de Eresby.  The two estates remain in joint ownership, although nowadays they are managed by The Grimsthorpe and Drummond Castle Trust.

Clementina was clearly a keen gardener – she was later described by the gardening writer Robert Hogg as ” one of the most tasteful, sympathetic, and friendly patrons of gardening I have ever met with” and it is thanks to her vision that we owe the next incarnation of Drummond’s gardens.

She and her husband were clearly ambitious modernisers but tempered by a strong interest in history. Historical revivalism both in architecture and garden design was becoming fashionable, particularly thanks to Walter Scott, and this may have been the motivation behind their ideas to  create new formal gardens to match the castle buildings.

Although detailed estate records are lacking it’s thought likely that the person behind the new layout was Lewis Kennedy of Lee and Kennedy’s Vineyard Nursery in Hammersmith.  Founded by two Scots gardeners the Vineyard  was one of the leading commercial nursery firms of the day, and supplied plants to many great estates as well as to the Empress Josephine at Malmaison where Lewis himself worked for a time.  Lewis also began to work separately from the Vineyard and amongst his commissions  were the design of a conservatory for the Duke of Atholl at Dunkeld in 1813, and  others at Chiswick and Trent Park in London.

responsibilityKennedy’s work was noticed by Peter Burrell, and he was offered the post of  Factor of the Drummond estates in 1818, and about ten years later also  took on responsibility for those around Grimsthorpe too. He continued to run both estates until he finally retired in 1868.   While Lewis was improving the profitability of the estate and planning new gardens Clementina and her husband commissioned Charles Barry, then in the early stages of his career,  to prepare plans for a complete rebuilding of the castle.  Barry’s Italianate style plan may have been too radical and it was not implemented with  only minor modifications being made to the existing buildings instead. Amongst these was the updating of the Tower House for a visit by Queen Victoria in 1842.

The question of who designed the gardens is up for debate. Barry’s surviving drawings  show two massive terraces and a staircase on the slope down into the garden, as well elaborate if somewhat sketchy parterres. However, since elsewhere Barry was  rarely interested  in garden design or planting, while he may have put forward ideas,  its more likely that the work was actually designed and carried out by Lewis Kennedy in his new role. An alternative possibility is that  it was an informal partnership between them,  because  one of Lewis’s sons, George Penrose Kennedy , became a student of Barry. George   certainly drew a detailed plan  which according to the guidebook shows “the additions and improvements since 1838”, as well as designing the banqueting tent erected  for Queen Victoria’s visit in September 1842.

By then the garden layout was  almost mind-bogglingly complicated  when  Victoria and Prince Albert ‘walked in the garden”  which the queen described  as “really very fine, with terraces, like an old French garden’. The couple planted two copper beech trees  to commemorate their visit.

As can be seen from the paintings commissioned from Jacob Thompson to celebrate Victoria’s stay, the garden is full of statuary which Barry is thought to have imported from Italy. There are also a large number of specially commissioned pots and urns embossed with  the family crest. These were made by the Abercorn Brickworks, an Edinburgh based pottery who supplied many of the large estates in Scotland.

What Victoria missed on her visit was the rare flowering of the Agave americana, or American aloe,  “in the princely gardens” in 1832 “with a flower stem 23 feet high, and beautifully branched like a chandelier, with a large umbel of flowers on each branch”.

Both Lord and Lady Willoughby died in 1865 but the good work was continued by their daughter, also Clementina, and her husband Gilbert Heathcote, Lord Aveland.

There are several lengthy reports in 19thc garden magazines of visits to the garden. The first is  in The Florist, Fruitist, and Garden Miscellany for December 1854 and describes how the garden was reached by stairs and “crossing  two or three terraces each supported by a deep wall, mounted with balustrading,”  These walls were covered with creepers, many of which were overwintered  in the greenhouses tucked away on the southern side of the far garden wall. These are still there today.  “Treated in this way for two or three years the plants … bloom much more profusely.”  Amongst them were verbenas that reached the top of the 14ft walls and which attracted the glowing praise of gardener and garden writer, Donald Beaton, in The Cottage Gardener in October 1860.

A long list of planst grown on the terraces survives, and shows that there were long. blocks of single species including bright blue Salvia patens, asters, calceolarias and pelargoniums, interspersed every 20 yards with plantings of hollyhocks and dahlias to give height.  It must have been a blaze of colour in almost every shade of the rainbow, an effect considered “striking” according to the guidebook.

The same visual impact would have been seen in the planting in the parterres and borders in the main garden. Together they formed “a long parallelogram of upwards of 15 acres in extent” , the principal feature being a saltire or ” St. Andrew’s Cross, formed by diagonal walks of turf, accompanied on each side by a border some five feet in width, along which are planted, in masses, some of the gayest and most striking plants which can be selected ”

A contemporary plan shows the remaining space,”planted up with nearly every kind of evergreen, interspersed with flowering shrubs [and] Most tastefully arranged in the midst of these masses of shrubs are vases, pedestals, sculpture, and numbers of the spirally trained trees.”  Looking down on this from the courtyard and terraces ” the masses and long lines of colour are …so happily blended together, that nothing appears wanting. The rich evergreen masses would by themselves perhaps have appeared heavy ; but intersected by walks, carrying margins of colour with them, and the central parts being relieved by architecture and trees, vases, &c., there is produced a happy combination of colour and repose, forming as a whole a picture which we venture to affirm has never been surpassed.”

The naturalist and garden writer Noel Humphreys wrote about his visit  in May 1874 praising most things about the garden but like many a visitor I’m sure…” confessed, that the geometrical principle is sometimes carried to excess.”   Her ladyship presumably asked for her family coats of arms to be be displayed in flowers  so “a carefully planted band of scarlet or crimson flowers serpentining through a square or shield-formed mass of yellow ones” could be seen although  were  “scarcely defensible on aesthetic grounds”. However,  “the dimensions of the devices are so large  that effects are produced which quite over-ride the ordinary objections to the small neat fashion of the ” bedding system,” which has been satirically called the “pin-cushion style.”

He also felt  “one might fancy the whole scene the glittering fancy of a passing vision — a waking dream of the gardens of some fairy palace, such as one might read of in medieval romances.”

William Robinson was also very impressed by the climbers on the terrace walls on his visit in 1883. Writing in The Garden he said : “No Italian or French terrace garden could probably show the same high beauty at the same period of the year, whatever they might do earlier”. However “The charm of the place ceases in part with the terraces, for below them is one of those wonderful displays of “bedding out” in its cruder forms, which attained to their greatest glory (or degradation) near large Scottish houses.”

He identified the problem that was to cause the radical rethinking of the garden that was to come much later because “the number [of bedding plants] put out is so great that the annual labour is a serious business.”  Instead he argued that the garden should be  “treated in a free and picturesque way…With free little lawns of grass and natural groups of flowering shrubs feathered to the grass ; with Yuccas and bold plants among them, and many colonies and groups of hardy flowers in spring, early summer, and autumn, the contrast with the necessarily formal gardening of the walls and wall borders would be charming.”

Overall the  scene has all the characteristics of what was thought at the time to be an elite 17th century Scottish Renaissance garden, although of course many of the plants used were recent exotic imports rather than what would have been available in the 1630s.

All the references to  Drummond in these gardening magazines were generally very positive and show that the effect certainly lasted through Clementina, Lady Aveland. By the time she died   in 1888, she had spent huge amounts of money on garden and wider estate improvements, including over 160 miles of fencing, £45,000 on farm buildings, and more than £8,000 on drainage.” The estate passed to her son, the Earl of Ancaster who gave  the castle  a “Scottish baronial” makeover  following a fire.

Drummond next features in Gardens Old & New; the country house & its garden environment by Avray Tipping in 1900, which has a series of photographs showing the gardens in their Edwardian heyday and which emphasise their dense planting. [sadly only black and white or we’d sunglasses to look at them]

But the usual next stage of the story is familiar. The Victorian gardens were far too heavily planted and complex  and require such high maintenance as to be unaffordable after WWI. They fell into decline.

 

After the Second World War, Phyllis Astor, wife of the 3rd Earl of Ancaster bit the bullet and decided the gardens had to be simplified drastically.  Huge swathes of trees and shrubs were cleared and the pattern of the parterres and other beds severely simplified, although significant features were left in place, including a clump of yew, now so big we could stand underneath its dome, and the two copper beech trees planted by Queen Victoria.

It is this garden which is maintained by head gardener Edith Brown and her small team, aided occasionally by a cherry picker to clip the tallest trees or reduce their height, and by a small army of robot-mowers!

Hear her talking about the gardens on this Youtube video. Under the circumstances they’re doing a great job and the gardens continue to look magnificent and amaze visitors, although what Lady Clementina or Lewis Kennedy would think is probably a different matter.

For more information, apart from the links above the best place to start is the Drummond Gardens website which has links to other video clips and articles.