A spare couple of hours and a chance to visit Hardwick Hall gardens as I was in the neighbourhood was too good to miss! Hardwick Hall is a late sixteenth century stately home, still full of many of the original tapestries and furniture.
Built by Bess of Hardwick, probably the most powerful woman in England after Elizabeth Tudor the building shines at you, as the sun reflects off the many windows.
“Hardwick Hall, more glass than wall”
as the old rhyme goes! Hardwick Hall with it’s many windows was a showcase of Elizabeth Shrewsbury’s wealth; glass was an extremely expensive commodity in the sixteenth century.
But I had only a short time available, so it was Hardwick Hall gardens I concentrated on; the Hall I will visit another time.
The National Trust owns Hardwick Hall, and the gardens are based on four main areas, the courts with their flower borders and topiary hedges; the herb garden, which is the largest in England and the orchard. I had a wonderful time seeing and smelling the floral delights in all of these different areas, but in this blog I’m focussing on the mixed herbaceous garden borders.
These flower borders were full to bursting with colour, sound, scent, bees and butterflies. Well, I say flower borders, and there were flowers from shrubs and flowering herbaceous perennials. But there were also some flowering ornamental grasses, slipped in as part of the overall planting scheme.
We don’t always think of stipa and miscanthus as having ‘flowers’ but of course they do. Grasses, more correctly known as Gramineae or Poaceae are one of the largest families of flowering plants with about 8,000 species.
One of the more obvious differences between the flowers of grasses and the flowers of herbaceous perennials is that grasses have fairly insignificant flowers. This is because grasses are pollinated by the wind, so they don’t need the lush, rich, often scented flowers, that insect pollinated plants need.
Personally I love the delicate feathery fronds of flowers that grasses produce. These can wave above our heads – as Stipa gigantea does – or flirt gently with our ankles as Festuca glauca does.
Some of the flower borders in Hardwick Hall gardens were full of delicate planting schemes and soft white flowers.
Other herbaceous borders were bold and vivid, with bright yellow Rudbeckia and orange- red crocosmia. A wow factor for when the clouds hid the sun.
I loved the little surprises; a red trailing fuchsia against mellow terra cotta brickwork.
And the larger little surprises, a lead container filled with a very happy pinky red leaved Phormium, subtle against the stonework.
All in all, Hardwick Hall gardens were a rich tapestry of colour and texture to complement the tapestries that hang in the High Great Chamber inside Hardwick Hall itself.
Although not a restored Tudor garden, the overall feel of the planting gave the impression that money was not an object – so very Bess of Hardwick, and for National trust gardeners working to a budget, no mean feat!
As for some other Tudor gardens with royal links, why not have a read of the blogs below, and see if you fancy a visit?
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Garden Visits – Romantic Kenilworth Castle
Garden Visits – Penshurst Place
Garden Visits – Historic Gardens of Hampton Court
