Acorn Bank garden in Cumbria is a treasure. Perhaps not generally the best known of the National Trust’s properties to the wider public as the house is in need of much renovation, the gardens themselves are important and beautiful.
The sunken garden with its formal pond, a home to great crested newts and herbaceous borders with butterfly laden inula are a summer treat for humans and wildlife alike.
But it is the plants in the two walled gardens; the herb garden, nationally famous for its collection of herbs and the orchard with 170 varieties of apples; that make visiting Acorn Bank such a fascinating experience.
There has been an orchard at Acorn Bank since at least the 1900s in its current location, the larger of the two walled gardens. The orchard has a mix of free standing, bush apple trees as well as some newer trained forms, particularly cordons. The gardeners have been adding pears, plums damsons to the apples to make this walled garden even more productive.
There seems to have been at least one walled garden at Acorn Bank since the 1660s; that containing the orchard is now home to many of the 170 varieties of heritage and traditional apples that grow in the Acorn Bank gardens.
The heritage apple varieties are mainly local to Cumbria and Lancashire, and some can trace their roots back to the 1700s; Greenup’s Pippin is one of the oldest. Apple seedlings are being propagated at Acorn Bank to be planted elsewhere in Cumbria and Lancashire to increase the stock of these traditional, regional fruit trees.
Maintaining a diverse gene pool of plants is important for many reasons. Growing varieties of fruits and vegetables that suit the locality tends to increase the crop resilience to pests and diseases and also increase the yields as the apple is accepting of the Cumbrian climate in a way that a Kentish apple variety might not be.
In the orchard the under planting of spring flowering daffodils and later flowering wild flowers and native species reflects the informal mood of the gardens and the importance the gardeners give to biodiversity.
The herb garden at Acorn Bank has a warning sign that is often found at the entrance to historic herb gardens – warning of the poisonous and potentially deadly nature of some of the plants contained within its walls.
It is true of many medicines, that a small amount heals and a large amount harms, but some people have trouble taking this on board when it comes to herbs and herbal medicines and assume they’re all ‘good for you’.
Set in the smaller of the two walled gardens, the herb garden at Acorn Bank has one of the most complete collections of herbs in the North of England, with over 250 medicinal and culinary herb plant species and varieties. It was started in this form by Graham Stuart Thomas in 1969 and is laid out in sections for different herbs for healing head, heart, stress, skin and digestive conditions.
Newts and frogs and the essential resident toad enjoy the easily accessible small pond in the herb garden. Planted with native species such as Greater Celandine, which is supposed to cure warts and verrucae, the pond shows how easy it can be to introduce the element of water into a small garden or an area of a larger garden; as it is basically a metal tray!
The red sandstone house at Acorn Bank makes a soft backdrop to the lush green of the gardens and woods. A tempting cart full of plants available for purchase lures you in. most of the building is still in need of renovation and profits from the gardens go towards this project.
Built on the site of a Knights Templar foundation, I discovered on one of my visits that the seventeenth century house had been taken over by flocks of sheep, I’m not sure they were the local Herdwick breed though; wonder if I should have had Sharpe the Border Collie with me that day?…
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