9 minute read
Arundel Castle While the world ground
This image Pots of tulip ‘Foxtrot’ are dotted through the Cut Flower garden for extra colour. Opposite ‘Apeldoorn Elite’ tulips in the beds that border a pathway past the glasshouse.
Above Italianate fountains bring a flamboyant touch to The Collector Earl’s Garden, with pots of tulip ‘Pink Impression’. Right Head gardener Martin Duncan, with members of the Arundel Castle garden team. The original 12th-century Norman castle, frequently battered, restored, and finally substantially rebuilt in the 19th century, has been the seat of one branch or other of the same family – that of the Duke and Duchess of Norfolk, the Fitzalan-Howards – for almost all of that time. The castle enjoys a commanding position above the river Arun that gave its name to the castle and to the town that sits beneath its walls. In the 19th century, the picturesque town was further embellished with a gothic-revival cathedral. Between castle and cathedral, two grand and dominant edifices, a most intriguing garden consisting of some 40 acres has evolved, much of it developed since the succession to the title in 2005 of the current Duke and Duchess, who take a keen interest in it.
Since 2009, the head gardener has been Martin Duncan, a plantsman and garden designer who won the Kew Guild Medal in 2018. He works with a team of seven full-time gardeners and some vital volunteers and, over the past 12 years, between them they have planted 1.2 million bulbs in the light and chalky soil. They hosted the castle’s first
The Potager’s mixed tulip display, with Narcissus ‘Thalia’ is surrounded by brightstemmed rainbow chard.
Tulip Festival in 2015, an event that went from strength to strength – until last year. It was, of course, devastating that Arundel’s annual, monthlong celebration, one of the best in the country, was cancelled in 2020. But for the castle’s owners and the small gardening team led by Martin, the cancellation must have provided a privileged opportunity to enjoy the peace and tranquility of the garden’s spring flowers in abundance, the birdsong and the blossom, during a brief period when the sun seemed endlessly to shine on an increasingly frightened population holding its collective breath.
“The tulips were,” says Martin, “the best they have ever been – and nobody came.” For him, of course, future planning carried on as normal: last autumn he and his team planted 126,000 spring bulbs, 60,000 of which were tulips, in anticipation of Above In a wide border the spectacular festival’s hoped-for return this year. buttressed by yew,
At the entrance to the castle gardens visitors alliums are just starting are greeted by a joyous display of massed tulips in to raise their heads above tulip ‘Passionale’.huge terracotta pots, a taste of a keenly anticipated Right The dainty flowers floral colour-binge to come. Walking upwards and of Tulipa ‘Little Beauty’. into what is essentially a 19th-century landscape, Below Mixed woodland all grassy banks and precipitous castle walls, the planting in the unusual Stumpery; the ancient ancient keep and barbican set to one side, a different stumps are from the picture begins to emerge. The wide gravel path is Norfolk estate. flanked by grass bejewelled with tulips, just one element of a long-season, informally “The tulips were,” planted melee of spring flowers augmented over the past few years: aconites, says Martin, “the best they have ever been snowdrops and the earliest narcissus will have led – and nobody came.” the march out of winter, with fritillaries, primulas and first blue, then white camassias closely on their heels with later-flowering daffodils in attendance. Overlapping these come the early-flowering tulips, followed by hordes of alliums floating above clouds of cow parsley, with laterflowering tulips bringing up the rear.
The colours ebb and flow with every twist and turn of the path and, as the season progresses, the bulbs are overtaken by a spreading population of native perennial wildflowers. Whole areas that formerly sported undulating sheets of grass between trees are thus rendered colourful for weeks on end, with paths mown between the floral drifts enabling the visitor to explore further.
The gravelled path leads gently upwards. Not to be missed along the way is the small, walled White Garden, attached to the Fitzalan Chapel, where ‘White Triumphator’ tulips and ‘White Dame’ wallflowers, the essence of tranquility, combine beautifully in all-white borders of shrubs, roses, clematis and later perennials.
From here, a door leads into an extensive walled garden that was previously the castle’s vast
vegetable garden, into Above Circles of ‘Thalia’ a theatrically formal daffodils with red tulip space, The Collector ‘Apeldoorn’ and a few ‘Purple Dream’ form The Earl’s Garden, designed Labyrinth, with a view of by Julian and Isabel the cathedral behind. Bannerman and opened Left The Roundhouse by HRH Prince Charles is wrapped in a dreamy meadow of ‘Passionale’ in 2008. A bubbling and ‘Paul Scherer’ tulips. fountain and rill here are flanked by enormous pots of ‘Pink Impression’ tulips underplanted with irises and forget-me-nots.
Beyond, and viewed through a massive hornbeamclad pergola, is the otherworldly Oberon’s Palace, both hefty structures hewn from green oak. Together with deep and curvaceous foliage-rich tropical borders littered with huge rocks, they powerfully vie for attention with the lofty cathedral beyond. Three years ago, Martin transformed the square central lawn, creating a spectacular grass labyrinth planted with massed ‘Thalia’ daffodils and scarlet ‘Apeldoorn’ tulips. The whole grassy expanse is mown in June, when it becomes a green, open-air theatre auditorium.
Head TURNERS
Arundel’s most colourful and flamboyant tulips and some equally eye-catching partners
DICENTRA SPECTABILIS
A wonderful partner for tulips, flowering in April and with fresh, feathery foliage.
PULMONARIA OFFICINALIS
Ideal for shadier borders, this bee-friendly early perennial grows in Arundel’s Stumpery.
PULSATILLA VULGARIS
Grow this sun-lover in very well-drained soil; silky seedheads follow the flowers.
TULIPA ‘MICKEY MOUSE’
Small flowers have massive impact thanks to their bright combination of colours.
TULIPA ‘FOXTROT’
Opulent double and lightly fragrant flowers open in a shade of rose pink that gets darker as the flowers age.
TULIPA ‘APELDOORN ELITE’
A Darwin hybrid with huge orange blooms, flushed red on the outside, in April and May.
And so, finally, still within the original old walls of the garden, to a series of more formally laid-out areas and a beautifully restored tropical glass house. The traditional herbaceous borders here are studded with a range of tulips in gorgeous combinations. Martin dislikes hard edges, and prefers borders that ‘spill’, but each of these borders (lofty, later, with cardoons, lupins and delphiniums) is separated from the next by once-solid hedges that have now been sculpted to echo the shapes of the spires and buttresses of the cathedral beyond.
The mildness of the garden’s microclimate (there is seldom a hard frost here) is nowhere so much in evidence as in the highly unusual Stumpery: here, smaller spring bulbs, including little, bright Turkish tulips, nestle between huge acid-green heads of euphorbias, the slowly unfurling fronds of Above Outside the the tree ferns and Hunting Lodge in The numerous, magnificent, Collector Earl’s Garden stand massed ranks of self-seeded echiums containers, filled with a reaching for the sky. mix of colourful tulips.
Planting BULBS
Practical advice from Arundel head gardener Martin Duncan
In the grass, bulbs are laboriously planted by hand and foot. To make life easier, Martin has modified longhandled bulb planters, adding metal plates, welded on to each side of the hole-cutting cylinder, which can then be relatively easily trodden into the ground to remove plugs of soil (“tulips have to be planted at least four inches deep”, he insists), before plopping the bulbs into the resulting hole and replacing the soil plugs. Bulbs are cast on the ground and planted where they land to ensure they look ‘natural’. Martin initially uses a turf cutter to remove the rough grass, replacing it after planting the bulbs with specially grown wildflower turf and subsequently using the seed-rich, late-summer mowings to spread the wildflower population around. To lengthen the flowering period of the castle’s large pots, tulips are planted close together in a single layer, with up to four harmonious varieties per pot, with different heights and flowering times. Bulbs in borders are left in situ and their numbers topped up annually. Big display beds are rotated to keep disease at bay: tulips one year, iris the next, then back to tulips and so on. Familiar tulips such as the Apeldoorns and lily-flowered varieties usually last well from year to year. Doubles and the exotic ‘parrots’ do not and must be replaced each year.
Left A gateway to the gardens, flanked by tulips ‘Apeldoorn’ and plum-purple ‘Passionale’. Below Away from the Walled Garden, in the Castle’s wider grounds, a beautifully lumpy hedge is picked out by rays of early-morning sunshine.
And even in 2020 the work was quietly continuing here. A small, shady woodland border was created close to the Barbican with rustic benches to relieve the weary. The latest project, the restoration of the Stew Ponds, the castle’s mediaeval fish ponds, beyond a circular spinney of slim, charmingly wonky white birches and made accessible by wooden walkways, is now home to breeding swans, all manner of wildlife and maturing water-garden plantings. Its scope and success has resulted in the project winning the Sussex Heritage Award for Landscapes and Gardens. n
Arundel Castle, Arundel, West Sussex BN18 9AB. Tel: 01903 882173; arundelcastle.org. The castle is due to reopen on 1 April, but check the website for the latest updates.
A Matter of TIME
Starting out as the kitchen garden of an Elizabethan farmhouse, the grounds of Norfolk’s Holme Hale Hall are now fine Arne Maynard-designed formal gardens, yet remnants of the past, from mature trees to an ancient wisteria, create timeless appeal
