Very Chilled

The Winter Walk at Harlow Carr, Harrogate, North Yorkshire Steven Desmond finds plenty of colour to cheer up the coldest winter day

- Steven Desmond

MANY established gardens have added winter opening to their visitor repertoire in recent years. The conventional gardeners’ rule that they should be left alone in the quiet of the year to recover from the tramp of the summer legions is now old hat. If the public are going to come in the time of frost and hail, there had better be something to admire.

The founding fathers at Harlow Carr, somewhat uphill on the edge of Harrogate, took the view of their initially unpromising plot that if a plant would thrive here, it would thrive anywhere. This initial caution was soon brushed aside as the unlikely combined forces of the fastidious Col Grey and that great gardener Geoffrey Smith laid down the bones of a garden always worth visiting in any season. Now that a branch of Betty’s famous cafe commands the view from the top, further resistance is useless. I’m on my way.

The Winter Walk is just below the entrance pavilion and parallel with it, skilfully placed to be immediately seen and rapidly entered. It is preceded by the heather garden at the foot of the entrance steps, which functions as a sort of overture to the main event.

Heather gardens such as this, long established and woven around naturalistic outcrops in the manner of a sandstone rock garden, are considered old-fashioned these days, but the quality of this one is so high that such questions are irrelevant. The heathers, or strictly, heaths, are all cultivars of Erica carnea, a species native to north-eastern Italy in the foothills of the mountains where some of the most desperate fighting took place in the First World War.