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Exploring Inverewe - Scotland's Garden at the End of the World
Rate it! Votes (2) | Comments (0) By L.A. Jackson Photos: L.A. Jackson Posted August 6th, 2007

NORTHWEST SCOTLAND -- When I first heard about Inverewe Gardens, I thought of ice cubes, heavy coats and frost bite. And why not? It is located on the far northwestern shore of Scotland just 600 miles from the Arctic Circle. On latitude 57.8ºN, it's right up there with Hudson Bay and is even farther north than Moscow, Russia.

Scotland, of course, is home to many fabulous gardens, and, early on a garden tour I was leading, even while seeing some of the other sensational horticultural sites, I couldn't get my mind off this supposedly lavish garden at Inverewe on the windswept heathlands and bogs jutting out into the North Atlantic.

I left with my group for Inverewe from Nairn, which is on the central north coast of Scotland. This meant crossing the Highlands to get to the west coast. The drive itself was memorable enough because the Highlands are home to some of the most glorious scenery in the United Kingdom. The mountains, worn at their bases by time, still defiantly point jagged, rocky peaks towards the heavens. The valleys nestled between the mountains are wide, undulating, verdant beyond belief, and often segmented by the long, reaching fingers of lochs, or Scottish lakes, creating post card vistas at almost every turn.

The isolation was intense. Few farms and even fewer towns interrupted the rugged landscape. Driving through this setting, I couldn't help but think, "I'm not going to a garden by the sea--I'm going to a garden at the end of the world."

What I hadn't taken into consideration, however, was the miracles often achieved by sheer Scottish obstinacy. It seems if you want to get a Scot to do the impossible, just tell him he can't do it.

Osgood Mackenzie was just such a Scot. As the only son of the second wife of Sir Francis Mackenzie, laird of Gairloch, he found his half brothers had left him land-poor when they claimed the estate after his father passed away in 1862. He did manage, however, to buy the adjoining estate of Inverewe and Kernsary.

At twenty years old, Mackenzie was the owner of a 12,000-acre Highland estate. But it was far from a storybook setting, as much of the woodlands had been harvested just before Mackenzie bought the property, leaving it a treeless wasteland by the sea. Undaunted, the young Scot had his home built on a rocky promontory projecting out into Loch Ewe. To complete his vision of a proper Victorian Gothic mansion, he constructed a walled garden on a raised beach beside the sea, bringing in, some say, suitable garden dirt from as far away as Ireland.

Because of the warm waters of the Gulf Stream brought to northern Europe by a current known as the North Atlantic Drift, mild, humid weather created a favorable environment that helped Mackenzie's garden thrive. Vegetables produced, fruit trees bore harvests and flowers bloomed prodigiously.

Early success encouraged Mackenzie to add more to his garden. This included planting over 100 acres of woodland with native pines as well as birch, alder, beech, oak, Corsican and Austrian pines. To this man-made forest, which helped to deflect strong winds and salt spray from the sea, he daringly incorporated a diverse menagerie of plants from the temperate regions of the northern and southern hemisphere. When Osgood Mackenzie died in 1922, his beloved garden was in good hands, as his daughter, Mairi, continued to develop and expand the Inverewe landscape until turning over the estate to the National Trust of Scotland in 1952, with an endowment for its upkeep.

Today, the impossible Inverewe garden is alive and well, as I found out when I pulled into the parking lot on a vanilla sky day that made for perfect viewing and picture taking in the 60 acres of intensive plantings. The old, one-acre Walled Garden remains, and, in spite of the years, is still resplendent with horticultural treasurers from around the world. Here, among some of the largest cabbages I have ever seen, were signature English plants such as catmint and delphiniums happily thriving and mixing it up with introduced exotics such as Blue Nile lilies from South Africa and Chatham Islands forget-me-nots.

And then there were the plants I thought I had left behind in the States. I was pleasantly surprised to find thriving such plants as hydrangeas, red hot pokers, alliums, roses, daylilies and hostas, which are staples in American gardens. But what really caught my eyes were the North American natives. The Joe-pye weed looked just as happy in this garden in northwest Scotland as it did in my backyard in North Carolina. Amazing. And the beebalm was as big and as healthy a blossoming mass as I had ever seen. The Walled Garden is the anchor of the Inverewe experience, but there are many more gardens to enjoy.

The Inverewe House Lawn and Rock Garden is a perfect mix of a groomed swath of green grass which fronts a delightfully disordered border of plants that unashamedly mix colors, textures and heights. The Wet Valley and Pond Garden gives visitors the chance to view woodland, bog and aquatic plants. Here, the usual such as water lilies, bamboo and primula, mix with the unusual, including North American skunk cabbage, pink-flowering ourisia, perennial groundsel from the Falkland Islands and gargantuan, eight-foot-tall gunneras. And if you think you have seen all there is to see in rhododendrons, think again. Inverewe is home to a very large, diverse collection of rhodos from around the world. China, Himalayas, South Africa, the Americas--these areas and others are well represented in this amazing collection that is spread throughout the gardens.

The America Garden, dedicated to American servicemen stationed in the area during World War II, is a lot like us. We are a mix of people from all over the globe and so are the plants in this garden. For example, Japanese maples happily blend with unusual South American ground bromeliads and tight mounds of alpine rhododendrons. The star of this garden, however, is a European native: a rather spectacular specimen of a variegated turkey oak, arguably the finest in the world.

There are, of course, many more botanical surprises at Inverewe, and finding all of them will probably take at least a full day. But, oh, what a delightful day it can be. And seeing the impossible at this garden at the end of the world should give any visitor from The States a vision of what their own garden could become--with a little bit of Scottish obstinacy, of course.

Inverewe Gardens is located on road A832, by Poolewe, 6 miles northeast of Gairloch. The gardens are open daily from 9 am to 9 pm, March 25 to October 31, and 9:30 am to 5 pm, November 1 to March 24. A visitor's center, restaurant and gift shop are also on site. For admission prices and other information, go to the National Trust website at: www.nts.org.uk/inverewe.html.

As editor of a leading regional gardening magazine, Carolina Gardener, L.A. Jackson has only just begun to explore the British Isles. Each year, he leads a group of intrepid gardeners to the UK to explore some of their finest gardens. For more information on joining this exciting adventure, call 1-800-245-0142 or go to the web site: carolinagardener.com/tours/england2.html.

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