Miss Jekyll’s little green thumbprint

Lindisfarne, or Holy Isle as it’s sometimes known, is a small island off the Northumbrian coast, not far from Berwick upon Tweed. It’s staggering beautiful and delightfully old-fashioned.

A causeway, accessible when the tide is out, connects this community with the mainland. People have been visiting Lindisfarne for hundreds of years on pilgrimages, as they do today. Fewer religious pilgrims these days, perhaps, but arguably many are pilgrims but of a different sort and not dissimilar values. For most coming to this enchanted place, nothing material about the island will have changed during their lifetime, those of their parents or great-grandparents for that matter.

I will leave you to research what the island offers, but there is much of historical and natural interest as well as religious.

Instead, as you might expect, I will focus on one, very small, walled garden. Probably one of the smallest walled gardens open to the public in the UK. And it wouldn’t have existed if a holiday home hadn’t been built on the island in the early 20thC.

The holiday home was more of a conversion, to be honest, but quite a conversion it was, partly due to the location and partly due to the architect. We are talking Lindisfarne Castle here, converted from the remains of a Tudor fort into a holiday home in the early 1900’s for Edward Hudson, the first editor of Country Life by none other than a relatively young Sir Edwin, or Ned to his friends, Lutyens. And quite a job of it he made, as, thanks to The National Trust, you can see for yourself. Ned wanted the Castle to have a small garden so he called on his good friend Bumps to design one for him. Bumps was his name for Gertrude Jekyll, the pre-eminent garden designer of her time who created over 400 gardens in the U.K., Europe and further afield.

And so, slightly bizarrely, in the middle of a grassy sheep field but just a stone’s throw from the castle, is a small but delightful and perfectly-formed Victorian walled garden.

And this is a place that needs those walls. Apart from the bluff to the south-east on which the castle is built, there is no shelter here. And yet the walls are not high. 6 or 7 feet at a pinch. On the south-east side, they are scooped to perhaps 4 feet, enabling castle guests to look over into the garden without having to negotiate the sheep on the way!

Now in mid April, it has to be said there is not too much to see. The layout is simple, divided into four equal quarters with crazy paving, so popular in its day, with a shallow border all the way round. This is a summer garden where many roses and emerging herbaceous will hold court from June to September. When we visited, there were tulips and daffodils in the borders, aubretia cascading from the stone walls (where it looks best) and apple trees, trained against the walls, were just coming into flower.

But, even in early Spring, the garden is charming, particularly the diminutive Beatrix Potteresque potting shed in the corner with the sign reassuring the visitor that the little bird inside is not trapped but comes and goes as it wishes!

The castle and garden are lovingly maintained by The National Trust (including a band of dedicated garden volunteers) but the garden is free. It’s too small to be a destination garden in its own right but it is a delightful natural complement to the eccentricities of the castle. And if you’re sitting in a sheltered corner of the garden, perhaps appropriately on the well-placed Lutyens bench, the borrowed landscape around is breathtaking.

There are not many examples of Lutyens and Jekyll’s work in the North-east, perhaps the nearest property being the rather larger Greywalls further north in East Lothian, also very well worth a visit.

As a postscript, Miss Jekyll went on to write many articles for the aforementioned Country Life, so one can only assume that Edward Hudson was more than content with his new holiday home garden!