Garden details

Telephone

01485 528569

Location

Admission

For the gardens only: Adults £8; Children (5 - 16 years) £3; Family (2+2) £22. RHS members free (Member 1 only) June and July.

Features

• Herbaceous plants
• Disabled facilities
• Fruit of special interest
• Glasshouses
• Herbs
• Sub-tropical plants
• Vegetables

Comment

The great Sir Robert Walpole made the park, now stocked with white fallow deer and contemporary sculptures, but it is the new plantings which draw visitors to Houghton today. The huge old kitchen garden has been spectacularly transformed by the present Marquess with extensive help from designers Isabel and Julian Bannerman. The layout is formal, and combines Italianate firmness with lavish planting. The results are inspirational, and very impressive: they include an formal 'Italian' garden, double herbaceous borders 130m long, a geometric interweaving of pleached limes and plum trees, a rustic temple and a tall fruit cage for growing cherries. Everywhere are such inventive details as an obelisk resting on spheres but all carved not from stone but from wood. Best of all is the extensive rose garden, whose design is said to have been drawn from mouldings on the ceiling of Houghton's White Drawing Room; true or not, the soft colours of the roses, and the interplantings with herbaceous plants and clematis make it a place of transcendent loveliness in high summer.