Things to do in the garden at Calke Abbey

Visitors in the garden at Calke Abbey, Derbyshire — Visitors in the garden at Calke Abbey | © National Trust Images/Chris Lacey

Discover a vibrant and productive walled garden, look inside the faded glasshouses and explore Calke's fascinating collection of garden buildings.

Calke's garden in bloom

Spend your summer days wandering through Calke's enchanting garden. Relax in the deckchairs, enjoy the scents that fill the air and buy some home-grown produce. The garden is open daily.

Bright highlights

The summer bedding brings lots of bright colour to the Flower Garden and the theatre display is a summer show of historic cultivars of pelargoniums – don't miss this popular highlight. The borders are a riot of roses, geraniums and peonies, with aconites and delphiniums adding some height in early summer.

The summer scheme includes a wonderful double dahlia bed in the Central Yard, containing a variety of dahlias. They look their best during August and September.

The Physic Garden

Calke’s Physic Garden is very productive during the summer months, when the beds are filled up with a crop of vegetables, soft fruit, cut flowers and herbs.

A fragrant sweet pea tunnel runs through the vegetable beds, complete with windows so you can peer through the sweet peas to see the growing produce and scarecrows. Take a stroll through the tunnel to catch a variety of sweet-scented aromas.

Fruit and veg from Calke's garden can be purchased from a stall in the back shed. Every penny goes towards keeping Calke's garden growing, helping to keep Calke Abbey's history alive.

The Walled Kitchen Garden

Don’t forget to visit the meadow inside the Walled Garden where you’ll also find Calke’s Georgian Orangery in all its abandoned glory. Bask in the warmth among tender plantings and take in the sights and sounds of the enclosed meadow.

Wander through to the Peach House to see delicious peaches and nectarines growing. The annual borders will be bursting with flowers from July, a real summer highlight.

Our gardeners will always be happy to chat, whether you want to know more about Calke’s plants and flowers or need some tips for your own summer garden.

Gardener's buildings and Bothy

To get a real sense of Calke's historic working garden, don't forget to peek inside the Gardener's Bothy, where you'll find a vast collection of garden tools, pots and broken cloches – it's a gardener's heaven.

Calke's garden was once an industrial hub, and the remnants of the historic heating systems can still be seen today in the back sheds and Stove House. You may find that some sheds are closed off during winter – this is so that we can protect areas of the garden from heavy footfall during the wetter months.

Did you know there’s a series of tunnels beneath Calke's garden? One of the tunnels leads to the house from the back sheds under the Pleasure Grounds. It was built so that the gardeners could go about their work without being seen from the house. The tunnel is open for you to explore – but it's quite low, so mind your head!

Download the property map to guide you around the gardens.

Property map