View to a thrill

No garden has left Alan Titchmarsh as impressed by the quality of its cultivation and overwhelmed by the sheer joy of its location as that of the Minack Theatre, carved out of a cliff at Porthcurno, Cornwall

- Alan Titchmarsh

SOME gardens have the ability to surprise; few have the ability to shock. The terraces above Cornwall’s Minack Theatre most certainly do. Carved out of a cliff at Porthcurno on the southern tip of Penwith—or, more accurately, artfully crafted with concrete at a time when building regulations were in their infancy—this outdoor playhouse-without-a-roof owes its existence to Rowena Cade, who owned the land and decided in 1932 that the cliff at the end of her garden would make a perfect theatre.

Since then, between March and October, it has hosted hundreds of disparate productions, from Shakespeare to Coward, musicals to operas, Fisherman’s Friends to French farce and, in recent times, has become celebrated for its gardens every bit as much as for its theatrical accomplishments.

Cade did have planted terraces within her auditorium, but they can never have been as spectacular as they are today. Now, their appearance owes thanks to the skills and plantsman-ship of Claire Batten and Jeff Rowe, who have been responsible for designing and planting the gardens here since 2019.

Building on the foundations laid by Cade and, more recently, by Niall and Jill Milligan, in charge from the late 1990s to 2018, Ms Batten and Mr Rowe have extended not only the areas of planting, but also the species that find life on a Cornish cliff to their liking. Few British gardens are as exposed as this one, yet the south-east-facing aspect, the poor but freedraining granite-based soil and proximity to the temperature-steadying properties of the sea mean that many plants that are too tender to grow in most other places in the British Isles—Tresco on the Isles of Scilly being an exception—not only survive here, but thrive.