Gardens to visit in spring and summer – Wakehurst Place

Wakehurst Place, located in the High Weald of Sussex, is an outstanding botanic garden and conservation area in its own right, but is also a very special site managed by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

Because of its mild climate, high rainfall and moisture-retentive soils, which complement the more extreme, drier and London clay conditions of Kew – having ‘Kew in the country’ allows many important groups of plants, unable to be grown successfully at Kew, to flourish.

In the woodlands there are trees from the temperate zones of the world and the mild conditions have produced trees of immense size and beauty on these grounds. The planting styles range from formal walled gardens by the Mansion, through expansive specimen beds which are so well labelled that even taxonomists can’t find anything to argue about (and I know, I’ve watched them!) to waterside and bog gardens. The estate is also home to four National Collections - hypericums, skimmias, birches and southern beeches. The skimmias are a spring delight, well worth visiting, and you will never think of them as boring shrubs again after seeing them at Wakehurst.

The main focus though, of ‘Kew in the country’ is conservation, with the Millennium Seed Bank being sited here and a wonderful tourable section sponsored by Glaxo where visitors can see botanists and conservators actually working to preserve plant seeds and materials for the future. But if scientists are not your thing, make time to visit the Francis Rose Reserve, the first nature reserve in Europe to be dedicated to mosses, liverworts, lichens and filmy ferns.

Wakehurst Place photograph by frielp, used under a creative commons attribution licence

 

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