Garden details

Telephone

01246 432310

Location

Admission

Gardens only: Adults £6; Concessions £5; Children £3. £1 for car park. RHS members free (Member 1 only), except on special event days.

Features

• Bluebells
• Herbaceous plants
• Camellias
• Daffodils
• Disabled facilities
• Rhododendrons
• Good topiary

Comment

The gardens at Renishaw were laid out in around 1900 by Sir George Sitwell, great-grandfather of the present owner. Sir George was an expert on Italian gardens and his book On the Making of Gardens (1909) is a gardening classic. He applied the principles of Italian renaissance gardens to the garden he made at Renishaw: symmetry, proportion, scale and shadow. What we see today are yew hedges, pools, fountains, grass and statues - a garden which would not be out of place in Tuscany or the Veneto. The plantings are modern, mainly herbaceous, and colour-schemed, but kept within pastel shades to emphasise the line of the formal garden. The soft colours of old-fashioned roses are perfect: Renishaw has three separate rose gardens with over 1,000 roses. In the woodland garden and against the walls of the kitchen garden, tender plants thrive that seldom survive in Derbyshire - Acacia dealbata, Cytisus battandieri and fremontias. Renishaw is also worth visiting in the spring, when daffodils fill the lime avenue: they were first planted in 1680 on the advice of no lesser authority than John Evelyn. They are followed by the flowering of the bluebell wood with rhododendrons, camellias and magnolias. In the recently restored orangery, the National Collection of yuccas is displayed against an Arizona landscape.