The Lost Garden Reborn
Image: Top: Gerard Binks | Lower: Helen Tabor
After more than a century of neglect, Yorkshire's Newby Hall has officially reopened its restored Edwardian Rock Garden following a landmark seven-year conservation and replanting project. Long regarded as one of the country's finest houses and gardens, the estate has transformed one of the UK's largest historic rock gardens for a new generation of visitors.
Originally laid out between 1912 and 1914 by Robert Vyner, then owner of Newby Hall, the 1,600 square metre garden was created at the height of the Edwardian rock garden movement. Vyner worked alongside celebrated plantswoman Ellen Willmott, with huge millstone grit boulders transported from near Pateley Bridge and arranged into dramatic rocky outcrops, cliffs and planting pockets. A small waterfall cascaded beneath an arched aqueduct bridge, through a grotto and into lily ponds below. Construction finished in the summer of 1914 — just weeks before the outbreak of the First World War. Many of Newby's gardeners enlisted and left to fight, with several never returning, and the garden gradually declined over the following decades as self-seeded trees, invasive shrubs and weeds overwhelmed the original planting.
The restoration, begun in 2019 by owners Richard and Lucinda Compton alongside head gardener Lawrence Wright, involved removing more than 35 overgrown trees, uncovering buried pathways and hidden rock formations, and introducing over 10,000 plants developed with alpine specialists Stella and David Rankin of Kevock Garden Plants in Edinburgh. The new planting combines classic alpine species with woodland perennials and moisture-loving plants, with drifts of pulsatilla, saxifrages, gentians, primulas, dwarf rhododendrons, trilliums and meconopsis — many nodding to the plant collectors of the Edwardian period, with species from the Alps, Himalayas and East Asia.
The official opening was led by broadcaster and writer Gyles Brandreth, whose renowned 1,000-strong teddy bear collection is housed at Newby Hall. He called it "a monumental day in the garden's development" and declared Newby "the finest garden in the North." Lucinda Compton recalled the project's unlikely beginnings — a chance encounter with the Rankins at the Harrogate Spring Flower Show — and the guerrilla early days of felling trees with a chainsaw over a single weekend. Head gardener Lawrence Wright described the guiding ethos: "Newby has benefited from three successive generations of passionate and knowledgeable horticulturists within the family. It has been and always will be, at heart, a plantsperson's garden."
(Top Image: Lucinda Compton, Gyles Brandreth and Lawrence Wright. Below: Newby Hall rock garden)
