Review by guest reviewer, Jim Cross, February 2005

We chose the February half term to visit Alnwick. Not unnaturally, the plants were not spectacular, and the garden depended on its architectural features to communicate pleasure. The fountains worked only sporadically - giving a total of half an hour over a two and a half hour visit.

The tree house was large, and allowed a queue to move slowly around some rooms. Anne Warehams's review (below)gives an impression of puritanical endeavour even in September. In February the earnestness of the gardens was well expressed in the literature and notices, but one had the feeling in perusing them that one was checking an application for a lottery grant. (Perhaps much of the literature was a direct quotation.) The Rose Garden was reminiscent of a visit to Fryer's Roses in Macclesfield.

Having said this critically, one has to admit that the staff were helpful and friendly, and recommended a good pub for lunch.
We shall pay another visit in Summer, as so much effort and money cannot possibly justify such a poor impression as we had.

Jim Cross

Review by Anne Wareham

visit September 2003

Alnwick Castle is a garden still under development, with the aid of lashings of cash from public sources. This has freed up the garden press in an extraordinary way, so that Alnwick now has the distinction of being the only garden in the British Isles to have received a serious review (see Garden Design Journal April 2004) and (unheard of!) negative comments.(Telegraph) This is unfair: every public garden of any note should be seriously reviewed.

So is Alwick the spectacular new major garden we're all told it is?
The tone and preoccupations of the garden are revealed by the Press Pack:- "Plants: There are already over 65,000 individual plants in phase one of the Garden, making it one of the largest European plant collections in the UK. …over 14,590 boxwood hedges (?!), 10,000 perennials and 32,143 beech trees are included in the phase one planting"…………….

You get the idea.

The famous Cascade was described to me by a fellow visitor as "heavy". It may look better when the surrounding pattern of trees has grown, but it is clunky. When just the bottom, low, gushing fountains are in motion the lower part of it looks rather like a water treatment plant. Then it begins to do its stuff and that is quite fun. We have something similar, if a little smaller, in our local shopping mall, Cribbs Causeway, and it does lighten the shopping. It's a kind of orchestrated display of spouts of water; the bottom one was described to me as looking like a cauliflower cheese.

It is jolly to see all these jets playing away, orchestrated by computer. But I do wonder if this is the best that modern technology and vast sums of money can offer a garden. It's all so familiar. If there's a time and place when you might really expect something fresh it should be in a garden that cost £40 million, with something like £16 million of that from public money.

I discovered that the Cascade looks best, indeed, quite attractive, from an oblique angle rather than head on. Head on is what it's designed for though: smack in the face as you walk through the gate. At present all there is between you and it as you come in is a vast area of tatty grass and an array of plastic toy dumper trucks. (this is true!) You are also staring right into the sun, which is unfortunate.

Where you come in there is one of those explanatory boards for the public, and it has a picture of the intended and not yet completed garden on it. You can see the current reality before you and the proposed reality on the board. In the picture the Cascade is portrayed from much higher up than any human height, so that the full circle of the bottom pool becomes visible, as does the water surface all the way up. This is quite an improvement, but unless they propose to offer the public viewing ladders it's a view destined only to be seen by flying insects.

This board makes it clear that a lot more garden is destined to fill the current empty space in front of the Cascade as soon as more public money arrives. At present what you get in addition to the performing Cascade is a rose garden and the walled garden at the top.

The walled garden is one of those places that leave me wondering what on earth gardens are for. The sight that greeted us as we walked in was a vast array of stakes. An understandable sight in the spring in those garden that stake things, but in September? The garden is divided into lots of smallish beds, some with quite high hedges round, so an overview or even long view is rarely possible. So you wander round and sample the wares: a mess of sunflowers, nasturtiums, marigolds and other annuals in a little hedged triangle; a sweet little fountain in a little pudding shape discharging into a pool with the water level far too low,- far too much of the rim of the pool shows, and unfortunately it was clearly designed to be that way; another triangle, this time of rather tatty perlagoniums; monster onions in monster pots (why?); the inevitable hybrid tea type roses, doing their blobs on sticks routine, in case you didn't get enough of that in the Rose Garden. And so on.

Well - then there's the Rose Garden. Over 180 varieties in uncoordinated colours, a mega advert (or not, according to your taste) for David Austen roses. The paths wiggle elegantly - I can tell that from the aerial photograph in the guide. I shall be happy if I never see another rose garden in my life (along with those tedious walled "Victorian Kitchen Gardens"). Unless there's a brilliantly different way to display them that I've never thought of? I did see a little public display consisting only of white Icebergs, and it seemed to me that an underplanting of one other suitable and complementary herbaceous plant could have made a rather stunning picture. No-one ever seems to do anything like this though, as if they haven't seen that the ugly bottoms of the bushes need hiding and the blobby effect of roses on a bush needs a strong background to offer some coherence.

The ideas behind the garden seem very puritanical. It has a full "educational programme" (aiming to provide "ongoing development as a centre of excellence for the creative mind"!) There will be a poison garden for children. No, sorry, not to dispose of them, but to teach them about dangerous plants (with water features which sound fun though), a Serpent Garden "aimed at teaching children about the different ways in which water can be made to move, illustrating the pull of gravity." (And the pull for parents of attractions for kiddies…….) There will be the largest tree house in the world (of course) - to play in? No, containing bespoke (?) classrooms….. It's almost Victorian in its worthiness.

I don't think the garden is as cynical as my account may make it appear. But it did make me wonder if it just isn't possible to make a good garden out of your head rather your heart and that that is Alnwick's problem. (Very similar to Abbey House in Wiltshire, which boasts of over 40,000 spring bulbs and is similarly institutional.) And it does matter that it is only half finished. Who would think that seeing an unfinished play or reading an unfinished novel was unremarkable? But half a garden, especially when the unfinished half is so in your face, is just a collection of bits.

I was so disappointed, as the pictures I'd seen of other gardens by the Wirtz's before had been stunning. They are very played down in the publicity material as the designers. Apparently the picture described as "an artist's aerial view" which appears in the guide is actually the original design. Did something go seriously wrong between the client and the designer?

If you have any comments to make about this review, please email me on anne@veddw.co.uk