Pensthorpe

Pensthorpe is a great place for anyone who loves nature, and the bird conservation work includes hand-rearing increasingly rare species such as corncrakes, lapwings and redshanks. But the often-overlooked gardens are the surprise delight – they really are spectacular, and it is well worth visiting just to see them.
Pensthorpe is home to two very beautiful gardens designed to complement each other and create year-round colour and form. Chelsea Gold Medal award winners Piet Oudolf and Julie Toll created them, and, whenever you time your visit, there is always something to see.

Millennium Garden
Piet Oudolf’s Millennium Garden really comes into its own in August, with magnificent shades of orange, red and purple, which then die back in autumn to more subtle hues of bronze and silver. This now firmly established garden is the result of the designer’s naturalistic prairie style planting. Piet is a leading figure of the “New Wave Planting” movement, which uses bold drifts of herbaceous perennial plants, chosen mainly for their structure. At its peak, this garden is a cascade of beautiful and unusual perennials combined with stately grasses.
Facing south, the Millennium Garden covers sloping grounds of around one acre, with a lake near the centre. It was commissioned in 1998, and work started in autumn 1999. Nearly 13,000 perennials were included in the scheme and, seven years later, everything has matured to create an unbelievable display best viewed as a whole for the full impact.

Really Wild Show
There is a large emphasis on the garden’s potential to attract wildlife – it blends in with the surrounding area, and has deep borders of bold drifts that look great against the backdrop of water, woods and grassland. The open garden is surrounded by willowherb and pink lythrum, which sometimes self-seed in the garden and are left in to complement the naturalistic planting. Many of the plants attract insects – some ofthem literally buzz with bees while butterflies flit from flower to flower.

Native plants for wildlife
The garden concentrates on using native plants which can also be found in the wild, since these can be more beneficial to wildlife. Signature plants include Lythrum salicaria ‘Blush’ with its soft pink flowers, the sturdy forms of Echinacea ‘Green Edge’ and ‘Rubinstern’, Veronicastrum ‘Temptation’ with its spikes of purple flowers, wine-red Astrantia major ‘Roma’ and the cream-panicled Filipendula rubra ‘Venusta Magnifica’. There is also a large selection of grasses, including Deschampsia cespitosa ‘Goldtau’ and Sesleria with its blue-backed dark-green leaves, and the mighty Miscanthus ‘Malepartus’ and ‘Roland’.

Lively combination
When Piet designed the garden, he threw out the rulebook about the right plant needing to be in the right place, and decided instead to combine different foliage and flower plants. Sometimes varieties have needed to be replaced, and Echinacea ‘Harvest Moon’, a bright orange daisy, will be added to the scheme in autumn. This lively combination of golden yellow petals surrounding a central cone is a real showstopper.

Grasses extend the season
The grasses are one of the main features of the garden and all plants were selected with a desire to extend the season, so that there is always something to see – even later in the year. Pensthorpe is open every day except Christmas and Boxing Day, so the garden needs to look good in autumn and winter. Throughout September and October there is more of an emphasis on the shapes of seed-heads and the structure of plants, rather than just their colour.


Autumn Colours
Each of the changing seasons is reflected in the garden, and another spectacular time is the hoar frost in autumn, covering the cobwebs and grasses with beautiful silvery colours, and branches weighed down with frost. The garden always manages to appear very natural, and yet it is carefully planned and regimented into compartments and blocks.
The garden is not completely organic, since chemicals are used on the paths because of a lack of time, but hardly any are used on the plants. There was an outbreak of rust this year but it was too expensive to spray it all so they just replaced the affected plants with resistant varieties.

The Wave Garden
The second garden area is the Wave Garden, created by the award-winning designer Julie Toll. It complements the Millennium Garden, looking at its best in spring with a fabulous bulb display. It is situated on the site of an old railway line embankment, where the ground couldn’t be moved around too much, allowing for a very natural, rolling woodland look. Yew hedges, which meander around the area in waves, will be trimmed to a height of between 60cm (2ft) and 180cm (6ft) when fully mature. This will divide the wilderness into sections with little windows through which visitors can view the separate compartments.
The different areas of the garden graduate subtly from wilder planting into a more formal area. It is a graded wilderness. Luzula grass, with its silvery seed heads in March and April, winds through the area as a faux-stream. There is full sun on one bank, then woodland, then a silt pit with fine soil, meaning that there are four or five different habitats in the one area.

Lakeside Garden
This lakeside garden sits delightfully under the resident oak, pine and silver birch trees. Beautiful blue Iris ‘Papillion’ flower throughout the area in springtime and there is a mix of herbaceous perennials – plug plants were thrown down and planted where they landed in order to create a natural look. When the garden was first created, 5,000 tulip bulbs were planted, then the resident wildlife spent all winter rooting around and only a mere seven came up in the spring! However, there is now a spectacular display in late winter, when thousands of spring bulbs start to emerge, bringing colour in the form of snowdrops, daffodils, and tulips, while geraniums and delicate hellebores create highlights in the carpets of woodruff and ferns.
The abundance of plants doesn’t stop at the two formal gardens. A stroll in spring through the bluebell wood or in early summer to see the wildflower meadows in full bloom with orchids, cowslips and wild primroses, is well worth going for. There is always something to see throughout the year, in the beautiful wildlife habitats and gardens of Pensthorpe.

Visiting

Pensthorpe, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 0LN
Tel. 01328 851 465
www.pensthorpe.com
Open Every day except for Christmas and Boxing Day. April-December open 10am-5pm daily, January-March 10am-4pm daily.
Admission Adults £8.50, children (4-15yrs) £5, seniors £7, family ticket (two adults and two children) £23.