SCOTLAND has a strong tradition of walled gardens created at a distance from a country house or castle, originally to supply the Victorian or Edwardian homes built when productive kitchen gardens were at their zenith. A number survive and have been restored in recent decades, but even more impressive is when one is created from scratch, as has happened during the past few years at Aldourie Castle, which sits overlooking the head of Loch Ness a few miles south-west of Inverness.
In 2014, the 500-acre Aldourie estate was purchased by the Danish couple Anders and Anne Povlsen. Over the previous 10 years or so, Mr and Mrs Povlsen had acquired a series of Scottish estates, which, collectively, have made them the country's largest landowners. The inspiration for their acquisition of some of Scotland's most remote and spectacular tracts of countryside has been the conservation of wild, natural landscape. At Aldourie, the inspiration was slightly different, the celebration of a castle that told a classic Scottish story: originally modest, but secure in the 17th century; baronialised in the 19th century; domesticated and modernised in the early 20th century-in a landscape and garden setting that are in part new, but sympathetic to the place's past.
Mr and Mrs Povlsen had seen and admired gardens by Tom Stuart-Smith and invited him to work at Aldourie. The designer first visited in 2015 and, from the outset, has relished the scope of the brief: rejuvenating the established landscape setting, in particular the parkland and the 19th- and early20th-century arboretum; at the same time as creating completely new gardens, the west garden between the castle and Loch Ness and the walled garden some 200 yards away to the north-east. In these new gardens, Aldourie's heritage would be embraced in designs that are boldly contemporary.
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