Trengwainton Gardens

This 98 acre shrub garden, overlooking Mount's Bay, climbs gently uphill for a third of a mile following a little stream.

Trengwainton faces due south and has a wonderfully mild climate, rarely experiencing hard frosts.

As a result tender and half-hardy trees, shrubs and other plants have been established here that cannot be grown in the open anywhere else in England.

Trengwainton is largely a 20th century creation although there has been a house here at least since the 16th century. Lieutenant Colonel Sir Edward Bolitho, whose family came here in 1857, began work on the garden after he inherited the rambling Victorian house in 1925.

The framework of the garden dates back to the early 19th century when Rose Price, the son of a wealthy West Indian sugar planter, planted the tall beeches and oaks that line the stream and shelter the house.

Without these trees Trengwainton would suffer the full force of the westerly gales.

Price also used much of his income from the Jamaican plantations to create the unusual walled garden at the foot of the drive. He used brick, a warmer but more expensive material than the local granite, to build a series of compartments.

The dividing walls between each separate garden have a steeply sloped bed of banked-up soil on their western side. This is a rare survival of a practice that was common in the late 18th and early 19th centuries and the south- and west-facing slopes receive the full benefit of the sun. Here early crops of vegetables are produced and tender plants cultivated.

On the south side of the wall are five varied compartments with tiny lawns, dominated by large flowering trees, and borders filled with a variety of shrubs and plants including eucalyptus, camellias, a climbing hydrangea, and passion flowers.

Many of the sweet-smelling rhododendrons that flower here in the late spring were raised from seed brought back from a plant-collecting expedition to the Himalayas in 1927-8 partly sponsored by Lt. Col. Bolitho.

In the woods leading up to the house are great banks of rhododendrons that flower white, scarlet and purple. The rhododendrons are ideally suited to the acid soil here. The stream and bog garden have their own charm.

Following the stream are feathery bamboos and Australian tree ferns and on its banks are lilies, primulas and other water-loving plants. In late summer hundreds of hydrangeas give the woodland a splash of pale-blue.

A sheltered spot next to the house harbours a huge 'Magnolia sargentiana robusta' which is a blaze of pink blossom in the spring.

The garden is mostly inward-looking but from the lawns in front of the house there is a spectacular view of St Michael's Mount in the bay far below, framed by an arch of beech.

Trengwainton Garden is now in the care of the National Trust. The house is not open to the public.