This is a rather unusual garden; under 600 m² in area, about 160 m due north of the castle and a considerable walk from the castle entrance on the south side of the building. It’s not a garden you nip out too! What makes it stand out is the quality of its design.
At the beginning of the 20th century Edward Hudson bought the then abandoned 16th century castle on Lindisfarne to convert into a holiday home. To make the transformation he engaged the famous Arts and Crafts architect Edward Lutyens and from 1903 to 1906 he remodelled the building. The only garden was a small patch of ground which had been walled off to form a vegetable garden for the garrison. He arranged for his collaborator Gertrude Jekyll to design the planting to make it into a small, sheltered garden.
As was their normal pattern of working Lutyens created the hard landscaping and Jekyll filled the garden with blocks of colour chosen to contrast and complement one another. In 2003 the National Trust, the owners of the castle and garden, restored the garden to as close to Jekyll’s original using the 1911 plan she had created for the garden. As with all such restorations some compromises had to be made, partly because Gertrude Jekyll plan was difficult to follow in places and partly because some of the cultivar she used seem to have been lost to cultivation. The staff do keep looking for the missing cultivar, incorporating them into the garden as they do.
Planting designs are easily lost and so this very well-preserved example of a garden designed by Gertrude Jekyll is rare and well worth the trip out to the island to see.
