Private passions

The British have developed a number of garden styles over the centuries but none more unexpected than the ‘woodland garden’. No one in 1800, when the first rhododendrons were arriving in this country, could possibly have predicted that a sizeable number of large country gardens, situated on acid soil in rolling wooded countryside or in deep valleys, would be filled in the next century or so with the plant riches of the Himalayas and the eastern United States.

But so it has turned out. At Caerhays, Heligan, Lanhydrock, Trebah, Trengwainton, Trewidden and Trewithen in Cornwall, at Leonardslee, Borde Hill and High Beeches in Sussex, at Crarae, Arduaine and Inverewe on the west coast of Scotland (to select just a few which are open to the public), wealthy Victorian gents with time on their hands, energy and a deep desire to do things properly, experimented with the cultivation of imported exotic plants, most particularly species of the vast rhododendron tribe.