Alpine Gardening With The Experts

At Burnby Hall Gardens in Yorkshire, head gardener Ian Murphy and his team are painstakingly restoring their historical rock garden

- Karen Murphy

For the last two years The Rock Garden at Burnby Hall has been the focus of a Lottery-funded project, which has recently seen extensive replanting take place. The aim is to restore it to The rock garden as it was – this picture was taken in 1920 how its founders would have envisaged it more 100 years ago.

When Major Percy Stewart and his wife Katharine moved into Burnby Hall they renovated the house and overhauled the gardens. In 1910 they decided on a new half-acre rock garden and hired renowned horticulturists Backhouse Nursery of York.

Backhouse built quite a few in this period, though Burnby is one of the few surviving examples of their work.

Over the years since Major Stewart’s death in 1961 the rock garden became overgrown, the formation of the rocks underneath consumed by weeds and shrubbery.

The gardening team at Burnby wanted to restore this key garden feature to its former glory and applied for a Heritage Lottery grant. They received £634,800, which has been used to renovate the rock garden, as well as the garden’s lakes, home to a National Collection of more than 100 varieties of hardy water lilies (Nymphaea), started by Katharine Stewart herself.