Sleeping beauty awakes

James Alexander-Sinclair admires the enthusiastic revival of a family garden near the Solway Firth

- James Alexander-Sinclair

SOMEONE once described this garden as a bit quirky,’ confided head gardener Robert Lyle, as we walked through the gardens of Southwick House. Standing there, surrounded by an eclectic collection of trees, with beds bulging with shrubs and enveloped by high hedges and even higher granite walls, one cannot help agree that ‘someone’ neatly put their finger on the nub of the garden. It is undoubtedly quirky, but also majestic and very charming.

Southwick House sits by the Solway Firth in the rolling pastureland of the Scottish borderlands. The house was built in 1750 and went through various extensions and enlargements over the next century before being bought by the magnificently named Sir Mark MacTaggart Stewart MP. He not only added another couple of wings to the house, but also started planting the fir trees (both Douglas and silver) and the rhododendrons that mark the skeleton of the garden. In 1926, the estate was sold to R. G. D. Thomas, grandfather of the current owner, Robert Thomas, who lives here with his wife, Kazuko.

After the head start given to the gardens by Sir Mark, not a lot of gardening happened under the Thomases, because the house was requisitioned as a convalescent home in the Second World War and the gardens given into the loving hands of land girls, who put their efforts into producing vast quantities of vegetables.

Robert’s mother Joan was the guiding light behind the renaissance of the gardens. It was she who enrolled Southwick into Scotland’s Gardens Scheme and it has opened every year for the past 70 years. She planted herbaceous borders, put in hedges, laid paths and set out the gardens. She thoroughly enjoyed herself until, due to old age and failing eyesight, she had to step back in the mid 1980s.