Garden News | January 2025

Happy new year to all of our members and visitors from the garden team here at Leonardslee!

As we enter a new year, and what will be my fifth since taking over as Head Gardener, now seems like the perfect time to look back on some of the developments in the garden during 2024 and also look forward to some of the exciting horticultural plans we have for 2025.

To say 2024 was a busy year for everyone at Leonardslee Lakes & Gardens, would be a huge understatement! You will all be fully aware of the bespoke play park and new retail space up at the top end of the site of course. My team were involved in both of those projects, whether it was planting new hedges and beds in and around the play park or carefully moving trees and shrubs from the old entrance building to their new homes throughout the garden for instance. But it was the completion of the garden compound at the south western edge of the estate that was perhaps the biggest change for the gardeners. Not only does it house us, our tools and machinery but it also enables us to make more mulch in our new compost bays and grow more plants in our dedicated propagation polytunnel space. The solar panels on the roof of the compound building and the ability to use the water from the attenuation pond and harvested from natural rainfall also help us to be even more sustainable, which is obviously something very close to our hearts.

In the garden itself there were plenty of developments too last year.

For instance, we created new planting schemes in areas such as the bed outside the eastern gate of Rock Garden which contains a number of specimen shrubs to extend the season of interest such as Clethra alnifolia ‘Ruby Spice’ and Hoheria ‘Borde Hill’ and the new exotic bed near the play area which allows us to increase the variety of unusual plants we grow in the garden including Chamaerops humilis ‘Compacta’ and a selection of Yucca, bananas and Fatsia. We also planted a new orchard area near where the chickens used to live containing fruit trees with local provenance such as Malus ‘Crawley Reinette’ and another apple called ‘Dr Hogg’ which was bred around 1878 by a former Leonardslee Head Gardener called Sidney Ford. Although still an ongoing work in progress, this space will eventually have wildflower meadows, bee hives, rustic log seating and larger nuttery trees that can be harvested by the Interlude chefs.

Elsewhere we planted nearly 22,000 bulbs in the garden again this autumn including a wide range of Alliums including ‘Mount Everest’ and ‘Pink Jewell’ as well as carpets of daffodil, Camassia and Crocus near the new entrance lawn. In the early part of this year they will be joined by around 10,000 ‘in the green’ snowdrop and bluebell slips to bulk out the existing collections. In the green bulbs are lifted by suppliers in late Winter / early Spring while the bulb is still in active growth. They are sent with the foliage still intact and in theory are quicker to establish once planted.

Our restoration work has continued apace across the estate again last year as we carried on the process of opening up forgotten areas and pruning long-neglected shrubs which are either blocking views or whose flowers are well above the eye and nose levels of our visitors. These projects will continue into 2025 and beyond as we seek to reclaim the garden from the ‘lost’ decade when it was closed and abandoned. We undertook the next phase of restoration pruning in Camellia Grove for instance, as well as focussing on a number of overgrown rhododendrons in and around the Rock Garden as well as alongside and below the stone steps above Bluebell Bank. This year we plan to add some areas along Cox’s Walk to the restoration list as we try to reveal glimpses of the lakes below.

We continued to add to our Rhododendron collection last year too. We focussed on specimens that offer a different season of interest than the usual April and May bloom time such as ‘September Red’, ‘High Summer’ and ‘Christmas Cheer’ – I’ll leave it to your imagination as to when each of them will be flowering! Some of these new rhodies were planted in an area known as the Hillside Garden. Although this area is not yet accessible to our visitors, we hope to open phase one in 2025 so watch this space for more information as that draws near.

Many of the processes mentioned above will move on to their next phases during the coming year. There’ll obviously be continued planting of interesting new trees, shrubs, plants and bulbs as well as further restoration pruning work for example. However some of the new projects we hope to introduce in 2025 include the creation of a new wildlife pond on the Event Field, a new redesign of the Interlude Drive approach road to the house that will incorporate a number of ornamental but foragable plants such as crab apple, flowering cherry and medlar and a new series of ornamental beds and borders near the back entrance to the Clocktower Kitchen to name but a few.

We also plan to make the Pinetum in the Deer Park more of a destination for our visitors this year. We’ll continue to identify, map and label the conifers here as well remove large sections of invasive Rhododendron ponticum and bracken as well as areas of self-seeded birch trees to improve views and extend access routes through the Pinetum and the deer park as a whole.

The old Alpine House near the Doll’s House Museum is no longer a greenhouse for the garden team. Instead, it will become a new seating area for visitors, but we will be designing a new planting display in there where we plan to include a range of tender rhododendrons as well as a number of alpines and succulents.

When you add in our usual work plan tasks of maintaining our 240-acre Grade I listed garden and estate, it looks as if 2025 is going to be just as busy and exciting as 2024 was. I hope to see you here in the garden again soon.

Jamie Harris

Head Gardener