The Garden History Blog

I’ve just been to Cragside in Northumberland and my first reaction was that its creators, William and Margaret Armstrong,  must have had very powerful leg muscles!

It is a stunning site but there are so many steps and precipitous slopes as to be almost unbelievable. It’s no wonder that the first house in the world to be lit by hydro-electricity, also had the world’s first hydro-powered lift. I could have done with one to explore the rock garden below the house as it covers 4 acres and is the largest in Europe.

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The Armstrongs planted an estimated 7 million trees and shrubs as well as creating over 3  acres of formal gardens and a range of greenhouses and conservatories for plants you wouldn’t expect to survive, let alone thrive, in Northumberland.

They were also philanthropists on a grand scale, supporting parks, hospitals, education and museums, as well as running businesses in engineering, shipbuilding and armaments  which employed over 25,000 people.  But for William Cragside was relaxation. He told a journalist in 1893 “I can’t begin to give you the faintest idea of the pleasure it’s given me… I feel certain that, have there been no Cragside, I should not be talking to you today – because it has been my very life.”

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The National Trust holds many of our greatest historic houses and gardens but I often think its greatest holding is not those but the many less well-known, less grand and yet more typical small country houses and estates.

I stopped off at one of them on my recent rainy and windswept visit to Bournemouth and despite the miserable dreary weather came away positive that this really is where the Trust’s great strength lies. Places like Hinton Ampner   may not be as well known as Stowe or Stourhead, and you may never have heard of Ralph Dutton but he and the house and garden he saved and re-invented are just as important to our national heritage, albeit in different ways.

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I’ve just spent a long weekend in high winds and  pouring rain , exploring some of the gardens around Bournemouth.  Not ideal conditions, even in February,  but the unusual advantage was that we were usually the only people on site!  The  one garden where the wind and the rain didn’t matter that much was Compton Acres at Canford, between Poole and Bournemouth.

Although originally built as a private garden in the early 1920s it was soon opened to the public for charity. After the first owner died it slowly became what Tim Mowl in his book Historic Gardens of Dorset, called “a visitor centre with gardens attached’. Now one of Britain’s most visited gardens it’s definitely none the worse for that.

A very brief history of the site and lots of photos of the garden today can easily be found on-line as well as  in the guidebook, but as I tried to research a bit further I discovered that  these sources gloss over the story  of the garden’s early days…

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