The PLANTS project: inventory at Culzean

Surrounding the impressive 18th-century house designed by Robert Adam is the large Culzean estate that includes mixed woodland, a deer park, cliffs, beaches, an adventure park, a lake, a large walled garden, formal terraces, a camellia house, glasshouses, and specimen trees. With such a rich and diverse plant collection, we had to prioritise which areas we would survey in the allocated three weeks. We decided to start with the Walled Garden and the terraces of Fountain Court.

The Walled Garden was built in the 1780s and was extended in the 1830s to its current size of 3 hectares. The garden is split into two halves – north and south. The south half was redesigned and replanted as part of a millennium project in 2000, keeping mature specimen trees such as the Trachycarpus fortunei and Cryptomeria japonica. Interestingly, there are two trees currently recorded as Cedrus libani (cedar of Lebanon – however, the younger tree looks like Cedrus atlantica ‘Glauca’. The inventory will record and try to resolve such anomalies.

The north half has been extensively renovated in recent years with a beautiful double herbaceous border as the central focus. We were grateful to the Culzean head gardener for providing us with lists of the newly planted perennials; these were an essential reference tool as we made our way through the myriad of herbaceous perennials. The north half also contains vegetable beds, cut flowers and a wide selection of fruit bushes and trees. One plant of note was the almond tree, Prunus dulcis, that had produced nuts – an unusual sight in the north of Britain.

More unusual plants were to be found in Fountain Court, an area of formal terraces built below the castle, where tender plants can grow in the mild maritime climate sheltered from the wind. Visitors were particularly taken by the 3-metre-tall spikes of Echium pininana, a tender biennial that self-seeds throughout these protected beds. It is endemic to the Canary Islands where it has become endangered due to habitat loss.

Another interesting shrub was the Eriobotrya japonica, which had produced fruit this year for the first time. The gardeners had previously been able to propagate this from cuttings but will now try to germinate the seeds collected from the sweet loquat fruit.