Wakehurst Place | |
---|---|
Type | Country house estate |
Coordinates | 51°04′02″N0°05′20″W / 51.06720°N 0.08894°W |
OS grid reference | TQ 33950 31418 |
Area | West Sussex |
Built | 1590 |
Governing body | Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew |
Owner | National Trust |
Listed Building – Grade I | |
Official name | Wakehurst Place |
Designated | 28 October 1957 |
Reference no. | 1025764 |
Official name | Wakehurst Place |
Designated | 1 June 1984 |
Reference no. | 1000189 |
Wakehurst, previously known as Wakehurst Place, is a house and botanic gardens in West Sussex, England, owned by the National Trust but used and managed by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (RBG Kew). It is near Ardingly, West Sussex in the High Weald (grid reference TQ340315), and comprises a late 16th-century mansion, a mainly 20th-century garden and, in a modern building, Kew's Millennium Seed Bank. Visitors are able to see the gardens, the mansion, and also visit the seed bank. The garden today covers some 2 km2 (490 acres) and includes walled and water gardens, woodland and wetland conservation areas.
RBG Kew has leased the land from the National Trust since 1965 and much has been achieved in this time, from the Millennium Seed Bank project and the creation of the Loder Valley and Francis Rose Nature Reserves to the introduction of the visitor centre, the Seed café and Stables restaurant, along with the development of the gardens.
Wakehurst is listed Grade I on the National Heritage List for England, and its gardens are listed Grade II* on the Register of Historic Parks and Gardens. [1] [2]
The stables are listed Grade II* and the South Lodge and gateway is listed Grade II. [3] [4]
The mansion was built by Sir Edward Culpeper in 1590. It originally formed a complete courtyard prior to being altered various times, and currently has an E-shaped plan. Wakehurst was bought in 1694 by Dennis Lyddell, comptroller of the Treasurer of the Navy's accounts and briefly MP for Harwich. His son Richard Liddell, a profligate rake, was discovered in criminal conversation with Lady Bergavenny, wife of William Nevill, 16th Baron Bergavenny. Nevill brought a law suit against Liddell who, rather than pay the damages of £10,000, handed the Wakehurst estate over to his younger brother Charles and went abroad. He was later an opposition Whig MP for Bossiney, and briefly Chief Secretary for Ireland. [5]
The house was illustrated in Joseph Nash's The Mansions of England in the Olden Time (1839), pp. 97–98.
It was sold in 1869 to Caroline, Dowager Marchioness of Downshire and then passed to the Boord baronets. [6]
The gardens were largely created by Gerald Loder (later Lord Wakehurst) who purchased the estate in 1903 and spent 33 years developing the gardens. [7] He was succeeded by Sir Henry Price, under whose care the Loder plantings matured. Sir Henry left Wakehurst to the nation in 1963 and the Royal Botanic Gardens took up a lease from the National Trust in 1965.
In 1887, American architect Dudley Newton completed a replica of Wakehurst in Newport, Rhode Island, for sportsman and politician James J. Van Alen from plans designed by Charles Eamer Kempe. Salve Regina University purchased the mansion from the Van Alen family in 1972. [8]
In 2022, the mansion was closed for an extensive renovation, predicted to last at least two years. [9]
Wakehurst is home to the National Collections of Betula (birches), Hypericum , Nothofagus (Southern Hemisphere beeches) and Skimmia . The Great Storm of 1987 decimated Loder's plantings, toppling 20,000 trees. [10] Since then, Kew has redesigned the gardens to create a walk through the temperate woodlands of the world. [11]
The Wellcome Trust Millennium Building, which houses an international seedbank known as the Millennium Seed Bank (run by Kew, not the National Trust), was opened in 2000. The aim of the Millennium Seed Bank is to collect seeds from all of the UK's native flora and conserve seeds from 25% of the world's flora by 2020, in the hope that this will save species from extinction in the wild. [12]
Nearby, also cared for by Kew, are the Loder Valley Nature Reserve of woodland, meadowland and wetland habitats, and the Francis Rose Reserve, the first devoted to cryptogams (mosses, lichens and ferns).[ citation needed ]
Wakehurst is home to the largest growing Christmas tree in England, a giant redwood. The tree stands 35 metres (115 ft) tall and is lit with around 1,800 lights from Advent until Twelfth Night. [13] The lightbulbs on the tree were changed in 2006 to energy-saving lightbulbs, so the tree is not as bright as before but uses less energy.[ citation needed ]
Much of Kenneth Branagh's 2006 film As You Like It , adapted from Shakespeare's play, was filmed on location at Wakehurst. [14]
On 4 June 2021, the BBC broadcast an episode of Gardeners' World from Wakehurst. [15]
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew is a non-departmental public body in the United Kingdom sponsored by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. An internationally important botanical research and education institution, it employs 1,100 staff. Its board of trustees is chaired by Dame Amelia Fawcett.
Buckingham Palace Garden is a large private park attached to the London residence of the British monarch. It is situated to the rear (west) of Buckingham Palace, occupying a 17-hectare (42-acre) site in the City of Westminster and forms the largest private garden in London. It is bounded by Constitution Hill to the north, Hyde Park Corner to the west, Grosvenor Place to the south-west, and the Royal Mews, King's Gallery, and Buckingham Palace itself to the south and east.
Ulmus laevisPall., variously known as the European white elm, fluttering elm, spreading elm, stately elm and, in the United States, the Russian elm, is a large deciduous tree native to Europe, from France northeast to southern Finland, east beyond the Urals into Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, and southeast to Bulgaria and the Crimea; there are also disjunct populations in the Caucasus and Spain, the latter now considered a relict population rather than an introduction by man, and possibly the origin of the European population. U. laevis is rare in the UK, although its random distribution, together with the absence of any record of its introduction, has led at least one British authority to consider it native. NB: The epithet 'white' elm commonly used by British foresters alluded to the timber of the wych elm.
Ardingly is an English village and civil parish in the Mid Sussex district of West Sussex, England. The village is in the High Weald Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty about 33 miles (53 km) south of London and 33 miles (53 km) east-north-east of the county town of Chichester. The parish covers an area of 3,974 acres (1,608 ha). The 2011 Census recorded a population of 1,936 an increase from 1,833 in 2001.
Gerald Walter Erskine Loder, 1st Baron Wakehurst, JP DL LLB was a British barrister, businessman and Conservative politician. He is best remembered for developing the gardens at Wakehurst Place, Sussex.
The elm cultivar Ulmus 'Atropurpurea' [:dark purple] was raised from seed at the Späth nursery in Berlin, Germany, circa 1881, as Ulmus montana atropurpurea, and was marketed there till the 1930s, being later classed as a cultivar by Boom. Henry (1913) included it under Ulmus montana cultivars but noted that it was "very similar to and perhaps identical with" Ulmus purpureaHort. At Kew it was renamed U. glabraHuds. 'Atropurpurea', but Späth used U. montana both for wych elm and for some U. × hollandica hybrids, so his name does not necessarily imply a wych elm cultivar. The Hesse Nursery of Weener, Germany, however, which marketed 'Atropurpurea' in the 1950s, listed it in later years as a form of U. glabraHuds..
The Wych Elm cultivar Ulmus glabra 'Nigra', commonly known as the Black Irish Elm, was found in the Kilkenny area c.1770 by the father of nurseryman John Robertson of Kilkenny, who later cultivated it. Robertson stated that he had not seen the form outside Ireland. It was listed by Loddiges (1830) as Ulmus nigra, and described by Loudon in Arboretum et Fruticetum Britannicum (1838), as Ulmus montana nigra. 'Nigra' is not mentioned in either Elwes and Henry's or Bean's classic works on British trees.
The hybrid elm cultivar Ulmus × hollandica 'Cinerea' was first listed by George Lindley in 1815, as Ulmus cinerea, the ash-coloured elm, and later by the André Leroy Nurseries, Angers, France, in 1856. It was distributed as Ulmus cinerea by the Baudriller nursery, Angers, and as Ulmus montana cinerea by Louis van Houtte of Ghent. A specimen in cultivation at Kew in 1964 was found to be U. × hollandica, but the tree at Wakehurst Place remains listed as U. glabra 'Cinerea'.
The Field Elm cultivar Ulmus minor 'Microphylla Pendula', the Weeping small-leaved elm, was first listed by the Travemünde nursery, Lübeck, and described by Kirchner in Petzold & Kirchner's Arboretum Muscaviense (1864), as Ulmus microphylla pendulaHort.. By the 1870s it was being marketed in nurseries in Europe and America as Ulmus campestris var. microphylla pendula.
The Millennium Seed Bank Partnership, formerly known as the Millennium Seed Bank Project, is the largest ex situ plant conservation programme in the world coordinated by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. After being awarded a Millennium Commission grant in 1995, the project commenced in 1996, and is now housed in the Wellcome Trust Millennium Building situated in the grounds of Wakehurst Place, West Sussex. Its purpose is to provide an "insurance policy" against the extinction of plants in the wild by storing seeds for future use. The storage facilities consist of large underground frozen vaults preserving the world's largest wild-plant seedbank or collection of seeds from wild species. The project had been started by Dr Peter Thompson and run by Paul Smith after the departure of Roger Smith. Roger Smith was awarded the OBE in 2000 in the Queen's New Year Honours for services to the Project.
Sir Henry Philip Price, 1st Baronet was a British businessman and philanthropist.
The Great Plant Hunt is a primary school plant science learning initiative, developed by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and funded by the Wellcome Trust. It is supported by DEFRA, Sir David Attenborough, and Science Learning Centres in the UK.
Kew Gardens is a botanic garden in southwest London that houses the "largest and most diverse botanical and mycological collections in the world". Founded in 1840, from the exotic garden at Kew Park, its living collections include some of the 27,000 taxa curated by Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, while the herbarium, one of the largest in the world, has over 8.5 million preserved plant and fungal specimens. The library contains more than 750,000 volumes, and the illustrations collection contains more than 175,000 prints and drawings of plants. It is one of London's top tourist attractions and is a World Heritage Site.
Abutilon pitcairnense, the yellow fatu or yellow fautu, is a critically endangered perennial plant that is native to Pitcairn Island. It was once considered extinct, until a single plant was discovered on the island in 2003. At that time, cuttings and seed were used to propagate several plants at a nursery on the island and botanical gardens in Ireland and England. The last wild surviving plant died in a landslide in 2005, making the plant extinct in the wild.
Pyrus cordata, the Heart-leaved pear or Plymouth pear, is a rare wild species of pear belonging to the family Rosaceae. It gets its name in Spanish, Portuguese and French from the shape of its leaves. In the UK, it is known as Plymouth Pear after the city of Plymouth in Devon, where it was originally found in 1870 The Plymouth pear was one of the British trees to be funded under English Natures Species Recovery Programme.
The Australian PlantBank is a seed bank located in the Australian Botanic Gardens, Mount Annan. The seedbank is part of the Millennium Seed Bank Project. The SeedBank replaced the former NSW Seedbank as part of an upgrade.
The UK Native Seed Hub (UKNSH) is a project of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew's Millennium Seed Bank Partnership growing and distributing seeds of UK native plant species. It is in part a response to the 2010 report Making Space for Nature by Sir John Lawton. The project, located at Wakehurst Place, in West Sussex, in the High Weald of southern England, is dedicated to enhancing the resilience and coherence of the UK's ecological networks by improving the quality, quantity, and diversity of UK seed species available for use in conservation, rehabilitation, and restoration projects.
Wakehurst may refer to:
Sorbus arvonensis, called the Menai Strait whitebeam or Cerddin Menai, is a whitebeam species in the rose family. It is native to a restricted area along the shore of the Menai Strait in North Wales. The species was first described by Sell (2014) and has been assessed as Critically Endangered.