Latest news with #LostGardens
Times
07-08-2025
- General
- Times
We had to restore a 100-year-old garden before we could build a home
Stuart Grant grew up in a 400-year-old farmhouse in Ayrshire and held onto his fantasy of a Scottish seat. In his mind, this was a Georgian manor in the Highlands. 'We always had a dream to live in Scotland,' says Stuart, 57. What the investor and property developer found was 17 acres of land that came with a ruin and an unusual proviso. The owner could build a large house with separate staff quarters on the plot, on condition that they restored the gardens, originally created in 1919 by the landscape designer Thomas H Mawson. Known as the Lost Gardens of Dunira, the grounds had once been the finest gardens in Scotland. However, they had been neglected for 60 years by the time Grant and his wife Amy, 41, bought the property in Perth and Kinross in 2017. Resurrection of the remains of Old Dunira House was out of the question. It had been built in 1852 for Sir David Dundas before the estate was acquired by the Macbeths, the family who commissioned the garden in 1919. The house had been a military convalescent home during the Second World War then, in 1947, was razed to the ground by a fire. In 1950, the estate was divided up and sold off and the gardens fell into neglect. The remnants of the house and gardens were put on the market in 2016 for offers over £750,000. 'When we started on the garden in 2018, the first job was to get the machetes and the chainsaws out and dig through an enormous amount of undergrowth. It was a four-year mission to get it into a state of order,' says Stuart. The garden designer he chose for the project was Simon Johnson, a celebrated landscaper who has worked on houses including Parnham in Dorset and Pitshill in West Sussex. Chris Palmer, a local gardener, was brought in to assist with the execution of Johnson's design. 'And then,' continues Stuart, 'we felt the house deserved a classical approach, so that's why I called Robert [Adam]. He's the best in the business. I sat down with Robert and then we just started brainstorming the art of the possible. And that's what classical architecture is about, Robert will tell you. It's often not creating something brand new. It's often copying elements of the past and repeating models that work.' • Read more expert advice on property, interiors and home improvement The build project began in 2020 and the six-bedroom home was completed in 2022, to Adam's design, with the collaboration of a local architect, Jimmy Denholm. The Grants left London and moved up to Scotland in June 2024. The brief for the building was to create Georgian-inspired architecture that was in harmony with the landscape, where the family could live and entertain. Inviting interiors designed by Emma Sims-Hilditch turned the rather grand edifice into a welcoming country home for the couple, their three-year-old daughter, Skye, two-year-old son, Charlie, and Stuart's daughter from his first marriage, Serena, who is 18. Stuart is no stranger to an ambitious project. His previous reno, also with the help of Sims-Hilditch, was a converted piano factory in Camden. 'I'd moved back from Hong Kong and wanted to live somewhere unique. This loft, it's like something you'd see in Tribeca in New York, with exposed red brick. It's like being in a scene from Friends. That's where we lived when Amy and I got together,' Stuart says. He had been interested in interior design since childhood: his parents ran a home furnishings and upholstery business, Art Fabrics, from a building on Sauchiehall Street in Glasgow. 'I grew up with fabric, carpet and wallpaper samples all over our house,' Stuart says. His father, Gordon, died two years ago and was one of the leading local interior designers. 'He did big houses in Glasgow, country houses on the west coast of Scotland. He did a house on the island of Oronsay for American multimillionaires, and then he did some suites at Gleneagles, in that Colefax and Fowler style, old country house, kind of traditional feel. He would hand paint the room configurations for his clients in watercolours [instead of CAD — computer-aided design].' • I turned an old town hall into my home — and an office for my workers There are homages to Gordon's work in his son's Highland home. 'The double-height hallway is a complete throwback to my father. If you go to our hallway in Ayrshire, you see that kind of rusty, pinky coral. That was his thing. I said to Emma, look, here are pictures of my parents' hallway. Can we do something like that? Because I love our house in Ayrshire. You go in, that colour is warm and welcoming.' Sims-Hilditch suggested that Edward Bulmer Natural Paint in Jonquil fitted the vision. 'It seemed quite a bold choice. I did think, 'Is this going to be horrific?' but it worked out beyond belief. People walk in and say 'Wow, amazing.' They love it. Nobody's walked in and gone, 'That's a shocker.'' Amy's culinary talents provided the inspiration for the ground floor. While her day job is in property, by night she is a supper club hostess who was trained at Le Cordon Bleu. Stuart says: 'It's called the Queen Bee Supper Club, and we have had about ten here so far. I'm the waiter. 'It's fun and it's for people who are passionate about cooking, who actually want to meet the chef and understand how the food's been cooked. So Amy gets up and gives a speech and tells people about her background [she's from Sydney, Australia, of Chinese heritage], and then inspiration for whatever the meal is that night and how she's cooked it. And then she rushes away and gets on with it.' The cream-painted Plain English kitchen features a squarish central island, a round table with rush seated dining chairs for family suppers and wingback armchairs set in front of a massive mustard-painted dresser. Next to the kitchen is the library, the walls covered in a stripe/floral mashup pattern fabric from Pierre Frey's Le Manach collection called Concini, and hung with ornithological prints. Through a jib door is the drawing room, decorated in classic country house style, with Colefax and Fowler's striped fabrics on the sofas and Robert Kime's Tashkent pattern, inspired by Asian needlework, on the ottoman. • Is this £1.7 million cottage the future of the Highlands? Stuart's favourite flourish? 'The cocktail nook between the drawing room and the dining room. So, you come in, have drinks in the drawing room, and then you walk through to the dining room and see that wallpaper.' Luxury wallpaper is a Sims-Hilditch hallmark, which guests enjoy as they drift into the next room to see a showstopping hand-painted de Gournay Chinoiserie wallcovering called Askew, featuring birds and blossoms. The downstairs loo is garlanded with William Morris Willow Bough pattern; the guest bedroom has Willow Crossley's Botanica design for Barneby Gates paper, and the master bathroom features Soane Britain's classic Scrolling Fern wallpaper. All the botanical prints reflect the importance of the restored gardens outside. The Grants have also transplanted successfully. In Scotland, they have embraced a new, outdoorsy way of living. Grant says, 'We've got a playground right outside the kitchen for the kids. We've got access to amazing hiking trails and we're particularly passionate about mountain biking. We're very keen tennis players. We've got a tennis court there. On a Thursday morning, we invite the local community to use the tennis court and have a coaching session. It's run by this guy, Mark Walker, who's Andy Murray's old tennis coach.' They never found their dream period pile but may have happened on a solution that suits them better: a home with the looks of a historic property and the comfort and efficiency of a new-build. 'People walk into our house and they think it's been there for a long time — which is the ultimate compliment. It's a brand new house! The energy costs are low. We have ground source heat pumps. And the windows are obviously state-of-the-art windows. It's a joy to wake up and know that everything's working.' He adds, 'I think what we want to do now is age it. It'll age through a few Scottish winters. And then we're going to grow some creepers up the outside of it, so that will soften it. It's a bit shiny and new from my perspective. But a couple of years down the track, it'll settle in.' Sims Hilditch: Beautifully British Interiors, by Giles Kime, will be published by Rizzoli on September 2
The Guardian
30-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Poem of the week: Nest Box by Simon Armitage
Nest Box When the drunken old fool saw the barn owl, he swore blind it was an angel. 'Half-human, half-eagle,' he told someone in the town square. 'White flames in mid-air, a ghost with wings,' he crowed to the gathering crowd. 'A weird presence that materialised out of the heavens,' he said to the scrum of reporters before he keeled over. They searched the meadow and heath but found only pellets of small bones and teeth and skulls and part-digested fur and knotted hair. Which was strange, because when the young girl saw the angel she swore blind it was a barn owl, but when birdwatchers went to the copse and looked in the nest box they found tinselly silver threads and luminous turds and a warm meteorite and a few feathers made only of light. Nest Box is from Simon Armitage's Dwell, a slim hardback collection illustrated by the talented Cornish artist and printmaker, Beth Munro. The briefly titled poems, such as Drey, Den, Hibernaculum and Insect Hotel, focus on the safe places, natural or devised, inhabited by the wildlife of the restored Lost Gardens of Heligan in Cornwall. Eventually, we're told, the poems will be 'manifested physically at site-specific locations and in different guises' – as installations, treasure-trails, sculptures and so on. Dwell, therefore, is an illustrated print preview, an informal, engaging, often humorous short collection that will appeal to younger readers, and occasional readers, and sharpen every reader's ecological conscience. The Lost Gardens project, today and in its future planned restorations, has supreme ecological significance, as Dwell makes clear. It's a story with major historical-political dimensions, too, concerning class, regionalism, and the first world war. I'm already speculating, and hoping, that a full-length collection might emerge later from the poet laureate's heartfelt engagement with the 'Willow Garden' (as its Cornish name translates). It is rich material. While the poems in Dwell are simultaneously grounded and freely imaginative, Nest Box addresses more fundamental questions about what we define as real. It reminded me, on a first reading, of similar questions raised by one of my favourite children's books, Skellig, by David Almond. There, the eponymous protagonist might almost be any homeless man, but, as he eventually admits to the children who have helped rescue him, he's really 'something combining aspects of human, owl and angel'. Almond acknowledges the influence of a short story by Gabriel García Márquez, A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings, usually classified as magic realism. Armitage's poem is more oblique: not contained easily in any genre box, it's essentially concerned with questioning the human response to natural phenomena, and asking how we can provide 'evidence' to challenge our possible illusions. There is an ecological force to the inquiry: humans need some enchantment to draw them into a less than self-centred concern with the environment, but we need to know what we see when we see 'nature', to best be able to preserve it. It's a big question for ecopoets, too. Nest Box begins when the 'drunken old fool' (or supposed one) swears 'blind' that he saw an angel in the sky. He burbles a riff of conflicting images: 'half-human, half eagle', 'white flames in mid-air // a ghost with wings'. The reporters investigating the story, after the man has 'keeled over', search for evidence, but find only the remains of an owl's last meal. Armitage's narrative, casual but determinedly objective, pursues the qualifications of rhetorical argument, the 'strange' and the 'but then'… A second observer, a young girl, swears her own sighting to have been a barn owl. But are the two visions incompatible? The evidence for the sighting of the angel consists of the remains of small mammals ('pellets of small bones and teeth, // and skulls, and part-digested fur / and knotted hair'). The evidence for the barn owl is pursued by birdwatchers, a breed of narrator we'd expect to be less unreliable than reporters. They check the nest box and find a mysterious, mixed assemblage: 'tinselly silver threads / and luminous turds // and a warm meteorite / and a few feathers made only of light.' Are the angel and the owl sharing the nest box by any chance? There are lively if not unpredictable 'turns' as Armitage's fast-moving, rhymed and half-rhymed couplets unroll, blending journalese and lyric tones. No adjudication is imposed: ultimately, the evidence for the nest box angel may be as unreliable as the old drunk's sighting of the creature itself. The young and not-so-young reader's imaginative intelligence is well-nourished. What evidence, we wonder, would show that an angel had used a nest-box meant for an owl? What is an angel? What is this one like? It's clearly not a grumpy old man with wings, and not as grand and strange as what was seen by the 'drunken old fool', either. It's an angel the size of a barn-owl, or smaller. Should we think of Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologica? Perhaps it's not any traditional kind of angel, but, in view of the 'warm meteorite', not essentially supernatural. The muscles of ratiocination and imagination need to be continually exercised by us earth-dwellers, not least because life-forms on planets other than ours are almost certain to be discovered one day soon. Armitage's 'Welcome Note' to Dwell is relevant to Nest Box. He describes how his grandparents fought to guard the eaves of their proudly well-maintained council house against messy nesting house martins. 'This kind of inhospitality,' Armitage writes, 'has increased in direct proportion to soaring human populations, and the consequence of homelessness for most living things is extinction. House martins are now a red-listed bird.' It's something to bear in mind as we enjoy the magic and humour of the angel-owl but ponder the last traces of its residency in the well-meant nest box. Dwell by Simon Armitage, illustrated by Beth Munro, is published by Faber & Faber, priced £10. To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
The Guardian
30-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Poem of the week: Nest Box by Simon Armitage
Nest Box When the drunken old fool saw the barn owl, he swore blind it was an angel. 'Half-human, half-eagle,' he told someone in the town square. 'White flames in mid-air, a ghost with wings,' he crowed to the gathering crowd. 'A weird presence that materialised out of the heavens,' he said to the scrum of reporters before he keeled over. They searched the meadow and heath but found only pellets of small bones and teeth and skulls and part-digested fur and knotted hair. Which was strange, because when the young girl saw the angel she swore blind it was a barn owl, but when birdwatchers went to the copse and looked in the nest box they found tinselly silver threads and luminous turds and a warm meteorite and a few feathers made only of light. Nest Box is from Simon Armitage's Dwell, a slim hardback collection illustrated by the talented Cornish artist and printmaker, Beth Munro. The briefly titled poems, such as Drey, Den, Hibernaculum and Insect Hotel, focus on the safe places, natural or devised, inhabited by the wildlife of the restored Lost Gardens of Heligan in Cornwall. Eventually, we're told, the poems will be 'manifested physically at site-specific locations and in different guises' – as installations, treasure-trails, sculptures and so on. Dwell, therefore, is an illustrated print preview, an informal, engaging, often humorous short collection that will appeal to younger readers, and occasional readers, and sharpen every reader's ecological conscience. The Lost Gardens project, today and in its future planned restorations, has supreme ecological significance, as Dwell makes clear. It's a story with major historical-political dimensions, too, concerning class, regionalism, and the first world war. I'm already speculating, and hoping, that a full-length collection might emerge later from the poet laureate's heartfelt engagement with the 'Willow Garden' (as its Cornish name translates). It is rich material. While the poems in Dwell are simultaneously grounded and freely imaginative, Nest Box addresses more fundamental questions about what we define as real. It reminded me, on a first reading, of similar questions raised by one of my favourite children's books, Skellig, by David Almond. There, the eponymous protagonist might almost be any homeless man, but, as he eventually admits to the children who have helped rescue him, he's really 'something combining aspects of human, owl and angel'. Almond acknowledges the influence of a short story by Gabriel García Márquez, A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings, usually classified as magic realism. Armitage's poem is more oblique: not contained easily in any genre box, it's essentially concerned with questioning the human response to natural phenomena, and asking how we can provide 'evidence' to challenge our possible illusions. There is an ecological force to the inquiry: humans need some enchantment to draw them into a less than self-centred concern with the environment, but we need to know what we see when we see 'nature', to best be able to preserve it. It's a big question for ecopoets, too. Nest Box begins when the 'drunken old fool' (or supposed one) swears 'blind' that he saw an angel in the sky. He burbles a riff of conflicting images: 'half-human, half eagle', 'white flames in mid-air // a ghost with wings'. The reporters investigating the story, after the man has 'keeled over', search for evidence, but find only the remains of an owl's last meal. Armitage's narrative, casual but determinedly objective, pursues the qualifications of rhetorical argument, the 'strange' and the 'but then'… A second observer, a young girl, swears her own sighting to have been a barn owl. But are the two visions incompatible? The evidence for the sighting of the angel consists of the remains of small mammals ('pellets of small bones and teeth, // and skulls, and part-digested fur / and knotted hair'). The evidence for the barn owl is pursued by birdwatchers, a breed of narrator we'd expect to be less unreliable than reporters. They check the nest box and find a mysterious, mixed assemblage: 'tinselly silver threads / and luminous turds // and a warm meteorite / and a few feathers made only of light.' Are the angel and the owl sharing the nest box by any chance? There are lively if not unpredictable 'turns' as Armitage's fast-moving, rhymed and half-rhymed couplets unroll, blending journalese and lyric tones. No adjudication is imposed: ultimately, the evidence for the nest box angel may be as unreliable as the old drunk's sighting of the creature itself. The young and not-so-young reader's imaginative intelligence is well-nourished. What evidence, we wonder, would show that an angel had used a nest-box meant for an owl? What is an angel? What is this one like? It's clearly not a grumpy old man with wings, and not as grand and strange as what was seen by the 'drunken old fool', either. It's an angel the size of a barn-owl, or smaller. Should we think of Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologica? Perhaps it's not any traditional kind of angel, but, in view of the 'warm meteorite', not essentially supernatural. The muscles of ratiocination and imagination need to be continually exercised by us earth-dwellers, not least because life-forms on planets other than ours are almost certain to be discovered one day soon. Armitage's 'Welcome Note' to Dwell is relevant to Nest Box. He describes how his grandparents fought to guard the eaves of their proudly well-maintained council house against messy nesting house martins. 'This kind of inhospitality,' Armitage writes, 'has increased in direct proportion to soaring human populations, and the consequence of homelessness for most living things is extinction. House martins are now a red-listed bird.' It's something to bear in mind as we enjoy the magic and humour of the angel-owl but ponder the last traces of its residency in the well-meant nest box. Dwell by Simon Armitage, illustrated by Beth Munro, is published by Faber & Faber, priced £10. To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
BBC News
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Photographer captures array of wildlife in Cornish gardens
Andy Wilson has worked at the Lost Gardens of Heligan in Cornwall for 11 years and as well as his role as head of restoration he is a talented wildlife stunning photography at the Cornish estate is the focus of a new exhibition at the gardens - showcasing the site's foxes to owls, pheasants to woodpeckers, Mr Wilson has captured an array of wildlife - using hides he built himself to get the spends hours waiting to catch creatures on camera but said he was pleased to have his work recognised. Mr Wilson said: "I'm chuffed to have my pictures exhibited at Heligan, photography is something I do because I love it but it's great to have this recognition of my work."Unless they're very lucky, Heligan visitors don't often get to see wildlife on the estate so this is a fantastic way for them to see the biodiversity of the site without having to wait patiently for hours in hides."The exhibition, called 200 Acres, is in an outdoor space on Heligan's west lawn. During his time working at the gardens, Mr Wilson has built up an "incredible knowledge" of the estate and its ecosystem, a spokesperson monitors wildlife movements using static, motion-activated cameras which alert him when wildlife is nearby – and then spends time outside his working day in hides to capture the shots, they Wilson has travelled all over the world photographing wildlife - including brown bears in said his favourite animal to photograph at Heligan was the fox.
The Sun
06-05-2025
- The Sun
Exotic English gardens lost for centuries is named one of the best in the UK
THE Lost Gardens of Heligan in Cornwall has been named one of the best in the UK. The gardens after 'lost' as a result of World War I - but has just won a King's Award. 5 5 The Lost Gardens of Heligan was first developed in the mid-18th century and were cultivated by the Tremayne family, with the creation of rides for horses, walled flower gardens, and a melon yard. It was thriving up until World War I, when the Heligan gardens were left to ruin. The 'lost years' were between 1914 and 1990 when they were rediscovered and the restoration project became one of the biggest garden transformations in Europe. The year 1991 marked the restoration of the Italian Garden, and the Lost Gardens of Heligan officially opened to the public on Good Friday in 1992. In 1994, the Flower Garden was restored and in 2024, The Lost Gardens of Heligan welcomed its eight millionth visitor. The Lost Gardens of Heligan is split into three parts and is home to the UK's only outdoor jungle which has exotic plants. In the jungle are four ponds, giant rhubarb, banana plantations, bamboo forests and avenues of palm trees. The jungle has a microclimate which is at least five degrees warmer than gardens in the north of the UK . It's where you'll also find one of the longest Burmese Rope Bridges in Britain, stretching 100 feet above ancient tree ferns. The Pleasure Grounds were first laid out 200 years ago - they have historic pathways and plants. The seaside town of Newlyn in Cornwall has been dubbed as one of the 'coolest' places to relocate 5 5 Some plantings are over 150 years old, and are home to the national collection of camellias and rhododendrons which were introduced to Heligan pre-1920. Like many gardens in Cornwall, Heligan reaps the benefits from a mild climate. The Productive Garden has 300 varieties of fruit, vegetables, salad and herbs which supply the on-site kitchen and are incorporated within the daily lunch menu. The Lost Gardens of Heligan is now one of the best gardens in the UK and in May 2025 was honoured with a King's Award for Enterprise. Laura Smit-Chesterfield, managing director of The Lost Gardens of Heligan, said: "The team at The Lost Gardens of Heligan are delighted, honoured, and proud to receive a King's Award for Enterprise." That's not the only award it has won - over the years, The Lost Gardens of Heligan has been named Britain's Finest Garden and the Best Garden in the UK. Tickets for The Lost Gardens of Heligan for adults are £28, children between 5 and 17 are £12.50, and children under five go free. Here's another pretty 'secret' garden in England that is more like going to China and Egypt. And six exotic UK gardens you can visit year round where it feels like the Caribbean - even in winter.
