A quirky and colourful garden on the Scottish coast that comes to life in spring
The arrival of spring is a moment that can define what type of gardener you are. One who has ordered bulbs, planted them in late autumn – usually in the worst possible weather – and then waited patiently all winter. Or one who is now regretting the decision not to do any of these things. Lady Dalrymple, who owns Blackdykes in North Berwick with her husband Sir Hew, is definitely one of the former. Throughout the short days of October and November, when the weather is frequently dreich, Janey can be found muffled up against the cold east winds, planting bulbs. After spending over 30 years creating the garden there, she knows that long winters are made much more bearable if there is the prospect of glorious colour to look forward to in the spring.
Blackdykes, like all good gardens, has evolved over several decades, from what were just blank fields of grass and wheat to a place where style and plant knowledge, alongside climate and geography, have come together harmoniously. The couple moved here in 1992, taking on an early-19th-century farmhouse with no garden, a mile from the sea. ‘There was nothing here – not even a single wall,’ Janey remembers.
Moving to a place where no garden has existed can seem like a golden opportunity to do something unique and personal – while also perhaps feeling a little daunting. However, Janey had a plan. ‘I wanted to make a formal garden in front of the house,’ she says. ‘I didn’t use a designer as I knew I’d enjoy the challenge of tackling the project myself.’ This inevitably meant learning on the job, with failures seen as lessons rather than mourned, and triumphs – when they came – were often happy accidents. She realised that providing shelter from the sea winds, which can blacken foliage overnight and stunt growth permanently, was essential before any plants went in on the three-acre site. So stone walls were built and hedges planted to create two elegant garden rooms, characterised by distinctive topiary forms. And hundreds of young native trees, including oak, beech and Scots pine, were planted on the garden’s periphery. This kind of forethought pays off in the end, but it can take many years on this cold coastal stretch of Scotland before trees and shrubs start to establish themselves.
The trees, whether clipped – as is the case with the avenue of stilted hornbeam – or left natural, like the amelanchier and crab apples, lift the eye upwards, interrupting the line of the wide horizon. This is most obvious immediately around the house, where tall, upright columns of Irish yew lead your gaze up and away to the hills beyond. There is also quirkiness. An expertly snipped pair of variegated hollies (Ilex aquifolium ‘Silver Queen’) frame the handsome doorway, with one leaning at a slightly rakish angle. ‘Nothing is perfect. That is the point of a good garden,’ Janey says. ‘A few imperfections make it more engaging.’ Clipped box hedges, most of which she cuts herself, spool away from the house and, as spring creeps in, the precise winter geometry gives way to a mass of exuberant spring bulbs.
But there’s no paradise without a serpent and, at Blackdykes, it came in the form of deer. ‘Last year was a particularly bad one – they visited throughout the winter, nibbled the bark of the young trees and helped themselves to nearly all our tulips,’ Janey recalls. Expensive and precious, these bulbs offer a rich source of food in winter for deer so, in order to avoid their depredations, Janey now mostly grows tulips in numerous pots and containers on the terraces by the house rather than in the borders. Some varieties of highly bred tulip have a tendency to decline year after year and need to be planted afresh each autumn to ensure a good display. Janey uses this as an opportunity to try different varieties, choosing those with a greater reliability to flower successively, such as ‘Slawa’, ‘Exotic Emperor’ and ‘Ballerina’.
In April, the garden is illuminated by many different kinds of narcissi, which, being poisonous, are left alone by wildlife. They also have the advantage of bulking up so that, after a few years, you will have hundreds. Varieties including old pheasant’s eye narcissus and earlier-flowering, sweetly scented ‘Actaea’, run through the wild garden on the periphery. There, they mix freely with delicate purple-chequered Fritillaria meleagris: a native of damp meadows, this naturalises well in rough grass and, though it can take a few years to become established, will reward patience with a sea of seemingly fragile flowers that can nevertheless stand up to the worst the weather can throw at them. Its dusky, bell-shaped blooms are complemented by nodding cowslips and a low blue carpet of muscari, scillas, puschkinias and chionodoxas on either side of meandering mown paths. ‘These lead you on a journey through the garden – starting in the wild areas, they take you past a spiral viewing mound to the formal series of rooms at the heart of the space,’ Janey says.
On walking round Blackdykes, following an uncharacteristically dry winter, it is clear how good the planting is. Clipped beech hedges – still bronze in April with last year’s leaves – enfold beds of freshly emerging perennials such as euphorbia, pulmonaria, peony and dicentra. Small trees and shrubs left in their natural form, including ornamental cherries, magnolias, philadelphus and syringa grow in the wild garden, along with species roses. You want to pause, linger, look and go back to check that it was as good as you thought it was. Happily, Janey has thought of that, too, with many seats and benches to tempt you to stay, although whether she herself ever sits on any of them throughout the busy spring is another matter.
Blackdykes is open June 19-20 this year. Visit scotlandsgardens.org
Sabina Rüber1/5Narcissus ‘Bridal Crown’.
Sabina Rüber2/5Euphorbias, tulips and narcissi fill beds near the kitchen garden.
Sabina Rüber3/5Beech hedges enclose clipped box and Portuguese laurels in the pebble mosaic garden.
Sabina Rüber4/5Box pyramids with prostrate rosemary.
Sabina Rüber5/5A view looking through Sorbus aria ‘Lutescens’ to the parterre.
