Garden Visit: Dunham Massey's Winter Garden

Last Monday, NAH and I took advantage of a relatively good weather forecast to visit Dunham Massey, a vast stately home and estate just outside Manchester. It was a sunny, showery day and our drive around the outside of the estate's boundary walls to its entrance was marked by vast piles of burnt orange beech leaves being whipped up by the winds over the walls and flying across our path. It felt a little like being caught inside a childhood Christmas snowdome, with leaves instead of snow and made an exhilarating start to our day.

The house itself is closed for the winter, but the parkland and gardens are open year-round. I was particularly keen to visit because a newly planted winter garden had been opened just a fortnight prior to our trip to Cheshire last week and I wanted to be one of the first to see it. It's meant to be the largest winter garden in England and we have only a few gardens open at this time of the year, so I was intrigued in seeing what this actually means. The celebrated plantsman, Roy Lancaster's been involved as advisor to the project, so I was confident the plants chosen would be top notch.

First impressions on entering the garden are favourable. This is the view looking north from the entrance gate. There's a good variety textures in the planting, using both evergreens and stem colour to provide interest. This view also shows much of the general structure to the garden: there's a network of gently curving paths which gave us a number of different walks around the garden to admire the various themed beds. There's also lots of healthy, mature trees and as soon as I saw these, the choice of a winter garden for this area started to make sense as their reduced canopy at this time of the year would allow the underplanting to start to shine through.

Further in, the youth of the garden really began to show itself. There's a wide variety of plants, all lovingly numbered by the garden volunteers (as they so proudly told me when we arrived and there's an accompanying catalogue available for £1 if you wish to know what all the plants are) but because the garden's so new, they've not had sufficient time to spread themselves out and for some of the beds to really knit together. This means that the much of the garden looks rather like a selection box of winter interest plants rather than a garden at the moment: it pretty much contains every plant of that ilk you can think of.

However, there was still much to admire. This is the Birch Triangle complete with bench from which to view it. There's plenty of benches dotted around the garden and each one is different: they're a great excuse to stop and listen to the roar of the wind through the trees accompanied by plentiful birdsong. The use of birch might be becoming a bit of a cliche nowadays because a number of conceptual show gardens have used it as their main theme over the past few years, but I still think it's an effective idea. Here, single columns of washed Betula utilis 'Doorenbos' are interplanted with black-stemmed Cornus alba 'Kisselringii'. At the back of the triangle (with a path between) the birches change to a multi-stemmed form and are underplanted with hundreds of marble-leaved Cyclamen. There are thousands of snowdrops planted, ready to burst forth in January. This is an area which I think will go from strength to strength.

An area still providing an injection colour was the Hydrangea Walk. The flowers may have been on the wane, but their skeletons were adding a faded beauty to the garden - particularly Hydrangea 'Annabelle' - plus this unamed cultivar was still going strong:

Much of the Bog Garden had been cut back for the winter, especially the skunk cabbage (Lysichiton americanus). For once the presence of duckweed in the small canal could be viewed in a positive light! In the distance, you can see a new bridge which takes you through to the other areas, which aren't shown in the guide as being part of the winter garden. However, there was much to see here too and I'll take you around them another time.

I liked how the addition of thousands of Acer leaves to this bed provided contrast and also echoed the red berries on the holly and other nearby shrubs.

The Acers also have a bed to themselves and this one was still adding its fire to this part of the garden. There's also plenty of the snake bark maple (Acer davidii) to add contrast and texture once they've matured a little more and I found some multi-stemmed Prunus serrula doing that job right now. This area also hosts the Scented Walk, where shrubs such as Daphne, Mahonia and Witch Hazels (Hamamelis) will play their part. Sadly I was there at the wrong time of the year to check out this particular feature.

However, there's plenty of ground-cover interest. I'd forgotten how good the pictured Arum italicum is at this time of the year and there were plenty of Hellebores already in flower as well as the last remains of the Cyclamen and various Colchicum. In the spring they'll be joined by thousands of bulbs in the Yellow Meadow (Daffodils, Iris and Crocus), the Bluebell Walk and the Blue Meadow (Scilla, Chionodoxa, Crocus and Dwarf Iris) areas.

My new discovery of the day were these dramatic seed pods of Cardiocrinum giganteum at the start of the Hydrangea Walk. Their stems stand 6-8 foot high and a drawing of their lily-like flowers adorns the cover of the informative weatherproof guide (returnable) you're given when you enter the garden.

I thoroughly enjoyed my visit, in spite of being there at the wrong time. I believe the garden will be even more dramatic in 2-3 months when the bulbs start to flower and it stands to be even better still once the shrubs begin to mature in a couple of years. Only then will I be able to judge whether this good garden is a great one - a good excuse to go back there then! In the meantime, anyone wanting ideas for robust plants to provide scent, berries, form or flower to their garden at this time of the year will find plenty of food for thought at Dunham Massey.

This garden was also reviewed yesterday in The Times (thanks for letting me know, Robert), have a look here if you'd like to see what Caroline Donald has to say.