National Trust announces plans for £1 million in garden investment, as its collaboration with Blue Diamond Garden Centres enters third year

Blue Diamond Garden Centres is one of the biggest financial contributors to the National Trust’s gardens and parklands, having committed to giving the conservation charity £1 million over three years.

The Trust’s Director of Gardens and Parklands, Andy Jasper, said: “We’re proud to be custodians of centuries of gardening heritage and we are ambitious for our world-class gardens. Our collaboration with Blue Diamond Garden Centres is helping us to accelerate projects that not only secure the future of plants and gardens, but ensure our gardens excite, inspire and are ready for the future. Together we’re achieving great things in our gardens.”

At Berrington Hall in Herefordshire – home to ‘Capability’ Brown’s final landscape – £130,000 of Blue Diamond funds will be put toward creating a new flower garden in the footprint of one shown in historic maps. A mix of more than 53,000 new flowering plants and bulbs, alongside exciting new wisteria ‘umbrellas’ and a restored Wisteria Walk, will give a long season of interest and bring back the spectacle, wonder and surprise that 18th and 19th century visitors would once have enjoyed here.

National Trust Project Manager Ana Vaughan said: “Pleasure Grounds in Georgian gardens were spaces for recreation and entertainment and this project will re-create the original delightful experience that visitors took from the garden. A new path network will improve accessibility, meaning everyone can enjoy the colours, scents and textural beauty.

“We’re grateful that monies from Blue Diamond Garden Centres are enabling us to make Berrington Hall an absolute must-see for garden lovers.”

Wightwick Manor near Wolverhampton will also benefit, with £30,000 of Blue Diamond funding enabling the renewal of the kitchen garden. Work will focus on improving accessibility through the garden to the newly restored Peach House, creating an extended period of interest, and increasing space for food production. The team hopes the funding will inspire visitors to grow their own, by showcasing fruit and vegetable cultivation, propagation and seed sowing.

Money from the garden centre group will also help the Trust with its work at Woolsthorpe Manor, the Lincolnshire farmhouse where Sir Isaac Newton developed his world-changing ideas. Funds will help the Trust create species-rich meadows, including seasonal bulbs, in the meadow and orchard, and to continue to care for one of its most significant trees – the apple tree so famously associated with Newton and his theories on gravity.

Benthall Hall in Shropshire will use £50,000 to rebuild a glasshouse to cultivate, display and engage visitors with tender plants collected by George Maw while living at the hall in the mid to late 19th century. Maw collected plants for Charles Darwin and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and is best known for writing and illustrating A Monograph of the Genus Crocus, published in 1886.

Nostell in West Yorkshire will use funds from Blue Diamond to establish an Apothecary Garden inspired by 18th-century lady of the house Sabine Winn. Sabine took an active interest in apothecary and herbal remedies, even commissioning a beautiful apothecary counter from Thomas Chippendale. Sabine had hoped to create her own apothecary garden and now, more than 200 years after her death, it can come to fruition, allowing visitors to explore some of the medicinal plants she knew, and their uses.

Alan Roper, Managing Director of Blue Diamond Garden Centres said: “The National Trust is a much loved and cherished institution. Blue Diamond is one of the largest financial contributors to the Trust’s gardens and our funding will enable the Trust to accelerate important plant and garden conservation works, continuing to preserve our heritage and open spaces for all to enjoy."

More details on these projects, and other projects funded or part-funded by Blue Diamond Garden Centres, will be released in due course.