Trengwainton Garden

About Trengwainton Garden

Trengwainton Garden lies on a gentle south-facing hillside at Madron, two miles north-west of Penzance and close to the tip of Land's End. Cared for by the National Trust, the 25-acre garden is known for its walled gardens, stream garden and wooded walks, and for views across Mount's Bay to St Michael's Mount and, on a clear day, the Lizard peninsula.

Warmed by the Gulf Stream and sheltered by its southerly aspect, this far corner of Cornwall has a remarkably mild climate with very few harsh winters. That gentle microclimate allows shrubs, tender and half-hardy trees and many other plants to be grown outdoors here that would struggle almost anywhere else in mainland Britain.

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History

A homestead at Trengwainton is recorded as early as the 14th century, and a house has stood here since at least the 16th century. In 1668 Francis Arundell bought the estate and rebuilt the house.

Much of the garden's framework dates from the time of Rose Price, the son of a wealthy Jamaican sugar planter, who bought Trengwainton in 1814 and was made a baronet the following year. His fortune came from the family's Jamaican plantations, worked by more than 700 enslaved people. Price made use of the gentle slope of the hillside along the course of a small stream, planting tall beech and oak trees to give the garden structure and to shelter the house from the westerly gales that sweep across this part of Cornwall.

He also built a remarkable series of walled gardens, using bricks made on site because brick holds the sun's warmth better than the local granite. Local tradition says they were laid out to the dimensions of Noah's Ark. Inside, steeply sloping beds face the sun so that the soil warms quickly for early vegetables and tender plants — an unusual technique, possibly a response to the "Year Without a Summer" of 1816, and one of which Trengwainton's beds are rare survivors.

After Price's death in 1834 the estate changed hands, and in 1867 it was bought by the banker Thomas Simon Bolitho. The garden as we know it today owes most to Lieutenant Colonel Sir Edward Bolitho, who inherited the rambling Victorian house and grounds in 1925. Working with his head gardener Alfred Creek, he built up an internationally important plant collection, and in 1961 he gave the garden to the National Trust. The house remains the Bolitho family's private home and is not open to visitors.

The Garden

Rose Price's walled compartments face south, sheltered from the extremes of the weather. Each has a small lawn surrounded by borders filled with tender shrubs and plants, including camellias and passionflowers.

Many of the garden's rhododendrons were raised from seed collected on Frank Kingdon-Ward's 1927–28 plant-hunting expedition to Burma (Myanmar) and Assam in north-east India, which Sir Edward Bolitho helped to fund. Some flowered at Trengwainton for the first time in Britain, and the garden's own hybrids, such as Rhododendron 'Morvah' and 'Fusilier', were bred here.

Close to the house, a large specimen of Magnolia sargentiana var. robusta gives a spectacular display in spring. This deciduous magnolia from Sichuan in western China produces large, scented, mauve-pink and white flowers that can reach 20–30cm across.

Highlights

• The walled gardens — ten sections of tender, exotic planting, plus the historic sloping kitchen garden beds.
• The Stream Garden — opened up from a culvert in the 1920s, with candelabra primulas and irises in early summer.
• Tree fern glades — towering tree ferns that give parts of the garden a sub-tropical feel.
• The Terrace — views across Mount's Bay to St Michael's Mount and the Lizard.
• Spring colour — magnolias, rhododendrons and camellias, many of them rare.

Visiting Information

Opening times, admission prices and facility availability change seasonally — please confirm details on the official National Trust site before your visit. Hero image: Trengwainton House — Photo © Chris Gorringe (cc-by-sa/2.0).