Garden details

Telephone

01665 511350

Location

Admission

Pay for a day, visit free for a year. Adults £12; Concessions £10.80; Children £4. Car Park £3.50. RHS members free (Member 1 only).

Features

• Herbaceous plants
• Camellias
• Daffodils
• Disabled facilities
• Fruit of special interest
• Rhododendrons
• Snowdrops
• Vegetables

Comment

The Alnwick Garden has become a major tourist attraction in a very short time - and deservedly so, because it is wonderful to visit. First open to the public in 2001, it is a continuing project, with new features appearing all the time. The Duchess of Northumberland is the driving force behind it, and the gifted Jacques Wirtz is its designer. The main feature is already impressive - a grand neo-baroque water cascade flanked by hornbeam arcades in the Belgian style and ending in fountains. At the top, you enter the Ornamental Garden, a place of box-lined paths, pleached apples, tender climbers (tea roses and ceanothus against the walls) and the best continental-style of planting outside Belgium. Here, too, are rare roses from Lens in Belgium, like 'Frisson Frais' and 'Lieve Louise', seldom seen in England. Whole beds are dedicated to a single genus, like hellebores, irises, Japanese anemones and delphiniums, so that there is always something to see, whatever the season. Just one example: 300 'Taihaku' cherries underplanted with spring bulbs. Down the hill again (the cascade flows down a north-facing slope and is difficult to photograph well - photographers, please note) is an excellent, thickly planted David Austin rose garden - some 3,000 roses with pergolas, climbers, shrub roses and a few mixed plantings - very beautiful. In fact the whole garden is probably best when all the roses are out in high summer. But there are fun features, too: the poison garden (opened by the Prince of Wales in 2007), the serpent garden, the bamboo labyrinth and the largest wooden tree-house in the world. The standard of maintenance is exemplary. The lack of a decent horticultural guidebook is regrettable, but this should not detract from the enormous pleasure of a visit to this enormous, sumptuous, inspirational and fascinating garden, still only two-thirds complete.