Singular Vision

Fifteen miles south of Belfast, down the narrow Ards peninsula on the eastern shore of  Strangford Lough lies a garden of such wit and exuberance that it could have tumbled out of the pages of fiction.

Mount Stewart is a Looking Glass world of strange plants and accelerated growth, where every topiary creature has a secret meaning and walls and pillars support a fantastical bestiary of Portland cement statues, each one an allusion to family and friends, including Charley the Cheetah, the wayward husband of the garden's creator.

Edith, Lady Londonderry was a force of nature. A famous socialite and founder of the Ark Club, whose members included Winston Churchill and Neville Chamberlain, she laid out most of the garden in a flurry of activity in the decade following WW1 and then spent the next 30 years orchestrating it to ever higher flights of fancy. She might have been a Marchioness, but Edith was first and foremost a gardener, wielding spade and saw whilst wearing her diamonds and driving her head gardener, Thomas Bolas, to hide from her on occasion in order to escape her inexhaustible plans for improvements.

From the outset, Edith understood that Mount Stewart's maritime climate, with its high moisture levels and almost total absence of frost, would allow a wide range of plants to flourish and so she set about removing the evergreen oaks that shaded the long and low grey sandstone house and creating an Italian Garden, a Spanish Garden, a Sunk Garden, a Shamrock Garden, the Mairi Garden for her youngest daughter, the Dodo Terrace (a reference to her father, Sir Henry Chaplin who had been satirised in the Westminster Gazette) and a Lily Wood.

The result is a swashbuckling, show-stopping extravaganza with surprises around every corner and thrilling touches of brilliance. Like a great impresario, Edith was forever producing flourishes with which to amuse herself and her friends. Her Macaw, Edward strolled free in the grounds, she imported a colony of tree frogs because she liked the sound of their croaking and for a time the lake was home to a flock of flamingos - a gift from King Faud I of Egypt.

Mostly though what Edith loved were plants and she pushed at every boundary, coaxing artemisia and ceanothus to grow as standards; clipping a giant Leyllandii hedge until its arches resembled those of the Generalife in Granada; experimenting with a surprising selection of alternatives to box hedging and planting lavishly, encouraging unusual climbers such as Lardizabala biternata from Chile to scramble over the walls.

Growing The Garden
Before her death in 1959, Edith bequeathed Mount Stewart to the National Trust and in recent years both house and garden have been restored. Today the man responsible for keeping the whole cocktail of experimentation and horticultural excellence fizzing is head gardener Neil Porteous, a Scottish horticulturist who has followed in Lady Londonderry's footsteps by never allowing the garden to stand still

Five years after his taking up the post, the plant list, once the largest of any garden in the care of the National Trust, is expanding again and new and exciting planting schemes are attracting a growing number of visitors.

This spirit of expansion has been boosted by the recent acquisition of the Mount Stewart demesne - almost 900 acres which includes the 18th century walled garden that once served the kitchens.  So while there  is plenty of work for Neil, his team of eight full time gardeners, two students, two part-time seasonal staff and 80 enthusiastic volunteers, still he insists on doing all the planting himself.

"I spend a lot of time thinking about where each plant should go."

You do have to question why, despite being ranked amongst the finest gardens in the world, Mount Stewart isn't better known? "Because you don't pass it on your way to anywhere," says Neil, who cut his gardening teeth in the family garden in Edinburgh when his father,  a sea captain, was off on his voyages.

His career has included stints at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, at Bristol Zoo and at Clumber Park in Nottinghamshire. Whilst there he struck up a friendship with Harry Dodson, star of the 1980's series 'The Victorian Kitchen Garden', who passed on to him many traditional techniques that have proved to be invaluable in his work at Mount Stewart.

Whereas at other historic gardens the temptation is always to try to retain it exactly as it was, Mount Stewart no such restrictions hamper Neil's vision.

"Edith never repeated herself, everything changed from one year to the next and so we are guided by her spirit of adventure. At the moment I'm pondering the future of several large lime trees and I'm pretty sure Edith would just have taken an axe to them."

Winter Protection
Other ambitious schemes include a new planting of cycads which in winter are protected with individual overcoats made from Enviromesh. Neil conceived the idea after hearing that cycads on the Japanese island of Yakushima spend the winter beneath rice mats. Now he is also attempting to coax cymbidium orchids to grow outdoors, along with large-leafed araliaceae including Brassaiopsis mitis from the Himalayas and he has visions of glades of proteas from South Africa.

"The garden is on a raised beach so those parts that are not over boulder clay are very free draining."

Despite this, moisture levels can be a problem. "We don't have particularly high rainfall, but we get sea mists and because we have water on both sides of us the air is always damp."

Saturation, low light levels, freak frosts, high winds, even higher tides, and the ever-present risk that the phytophthora pathogens will find their way through Mount Stewart's robust quarantine defences, are on-going concerns so Neil takes the view that a plant shared is a plant saved, spreading the collection amongst his wide group of gardening friends and associates and conserving the rarest using micropropagation and cryopreservation techniques that can hold a plant in stasis for 100 years.

"That way, should anything happen here such as a huge spring tide, then we can call back replacements from elsewhere."

Garden Notes
Mount Stewart
Portaferry Road, Newtonards, County Down, BT22 2AD
Tel: (028) 4278 8387
www.nationaltrust.org.uk/mount-stewart

Getting There
By Air:
FlyBe flies six times daily to Belfast City from Glasgow.
www.flybe.com

By Sea:
P&O sails from Cairnryan to Larne up to seven times daily.
www.poferries.com

Stena
Stena Lines from Cairnryan to Belfast up to six times daily.
www.stenaline.co.uk

By Road:
Mount Stewart is on the A20 Newtonards to Portaferry Road, 15 miles south east of Belfast.

By Coach:
Translink services 9 & 10 (Belfast to Portaferry) - alight at gates.
www.translink.co.uk