Garden details

Telephone

01604 686543

Location

Admission

Adults £5; Concessions £4.50; Children £3.50. RHS members free (Member 1 only), except special event days.

Features

• Herbaceous plants
• Daffodils
• Disabled facilities
• Glasshouses
• Snowdrops
• Good topiary
• Vegetables

Comment

Kelmarsh is a handsome Palladian house: it looks out over a formal terrace, designed by Geoffrey Jellicoe in 1936, to formalised parkland. The view extends across a meadow lined with horse-chestnuts to a lake before wilder, open semi-parkland carries the eye to the horizon. Most of the horticultural interest is off to the side, around the outside of a triangular walled garden. First come lumpy box hedges, pleached limes and a pretty sunken garden, designed as a quincunx and planted with white and scented flowers. Further on, Tropaeolum speciosum clambers through the hedges which flank a sequence of narrow, intimate beds, designed by Nancy Lancaster with help from Norah Lindsay. Some of the yew hedges have been breached by cutting the yew trees back to the trunks and letting them grow into curious hump-backed shapes - a very effective and unique feature of the garden. At the furthest extremity, the narrow path bursts out into a fan-shaped old-fashioned rose garden, recently remade, with a splendid view of the parish church across parkland. On the way back (outside the walled garden again) is the long border, another Lancaster-Lindsay collaboration, which has just been replanted. This is a fine garden, which will be interesting to watch as it develops in years to come. A Heritage Lottery grant has funded the restoration of the vinery and back sheds, which means that the walled garden with its cut-flower borders is now fully accessible.