National Trust’s Garden of the Future – Watts Up With That?

From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

h/t Ian Magness

The woke NT are at it again!

A Mediterranean garden stocked with hardier plants designed to survive hotter summers and wetter winters has been unveiled at a National Trust property in Yorkshire.

The new garden at the stately home Beningbrough Hall, near York, features more than 4,000 perennials, grasses, trees and shrubs from the Mediterranean and areas around the world with a similar climate.

The plants in the garden, hailing from places as far afield as South Africa, South Korea, Chile, China and Australia, were selected by award-winning designer Andy Sturgeon for their ability to cope better with hotter, drier summers and wetter winters.

The National Trust said extremes in local weather over the past year have underlined the need to adapt Beningbrough’s garden.

Andy Jasper, the charity’s head of gardens and parklands, said it hoped visitors would enjoy the garden but also “be inspired to future-proof their own gardens”.

“With more intense weather events, including drought and floods, predicted, our gardens need to change to better tolerate extremes,” he said.

Progress to deliver the Mediterranean garden has been held up by the very wet weather in the past year, with rain “almost every day” – an irony which the garden team said was not lost on them.

Created out of an underused grassed area framed by red brick walls, the Mediterranean display has a series of long masonry dividing sections made from local York stone, together with boulders and water bowls featuring miniature lilies

A large tank has been built under the garden to capture excess rainfall and slowly release it to prevent flash flooding, while a rill flowing into a new pond draws on archive photographs and archaeological research showing the likely presence of a series of ponds and a fountain in this area around 1900.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/08/05/historic-yorkshire-hall-garden-future-surviving-uk-climate

We were promised Mediterranean summers decades ago. And we’re still waiting.

I often cycle around Beningbrough, which is near York, and stop off for a slice of cake! I can assure you that the gardens there are doing just fine.

In fact I was on my bike near Thirsk last week, but apparently missed the climate crisis!