The Greys were always more interested in the great outdoors than most other stately home families; they were neither great art connoisseurs nor collectors and the house never contained pictures or furniture to the standard one might expect from their status. However, there has been a long tradition of planting in the family which continues to the present day.
Little is known about the gardens before the 19th century or their layout before the house was built in 1782. There are some immensely old yews in the grounds which must be several hundred years old, but there is no record of what Sir Henry Grey did when he commissioned the house.
Most of the old hardwood trees at Howick, particularly the beech and oak, were planted by the Prime Minister, Charles 2nd Earl Grey, during his long years in opposition in the early 1800s. This was also the time of the Napoleonic Wars and the patriotic thing for landowners to do was to plant timber required for the Navy. All the oaks up the Back Drive date from this time, together with all the beeches around the house and down the Long Walk. The beeches are all coming to the end of their natural life (200 years is a good innings for them in Northumberland), while the wych elms and the few English elms have all been killed by Dutch Elm Disease. He moved the front drive and the entrance to the house to the north side to allow the first terrace to be built in 1809, where mown lawns with specimen trees swept down to Howick Burn.
During the 19th Century a number of parterres with bedding plants were added around the terrace. The walled garden to the north-east of the house became well known with substantial flower borders, vegetable plots, and an orchard. Some fruit trees were trained against the south side of the north wall, which contained hot air ducts in it fed by fires lit in the early spring to prevent frost from nipping their flowerbuds as they opened. All this planting was swept away during the Second World War for food production and has not been restored.
The gardens were laid out in their present form by Charles 5th Earl and his wife,Mabel, both of whom were keen and expert gardeners. They inherited in 1917. Charles’s uncle was George Holford of Westonbirt in Gloucestershire (now The National Arboretum), while Mabel’s brother was Lewis Palmer, a noted plant breeder responsible for all the Headbourne hybrid agapanthus which he bred from seed brought back from South Africa in 1948 when staying with Evelyn Baring, later 1st Lord Howick, who was High Commissioner there at the time.
Charles’s empire was the woodland garden, which he created from 1930 onwards in an old stand of mixed hardwoods and Scots pine 200 yards to the east of the house, where he found some lime-free greensand soil ideal for rhododendrons and other ericaceous plants. He started planting it in 1930, the year of their silver wedding, and henceforward it has always been known as ‘Silverwood’. The collection of plants there are our best known feature.
Mabel’s passion was for bulbs and the flower borders. In the 1920s and 30s she planted thousands of daffodils from the best forms from those years, and Howick now has one of the best collections of inter-war daffodil cultivars in the country. Between them they built the second terrace and goldfish pond below the first, and planted up the grounds with many ornamental trees and shrubs in the ‘natural’ style advocated by William Robinson at the turn of the century. All the Victorian parterres with their bedding plants disappeared, while new borders were created on the south side of the house. They changed the whole style of the garden from its Victorian formality to the natural informality you now see.
This style was continued by their elder daughter, Lady Mary Howick, when her father died in 1963. She introduced a lot more ground cover into Silverwood, and also started planting single colour late tulips into the long grass, creating a magical effect with the wild flowers in early May.
The post war years were particularly difficult (taxation varied from 83% to 98%) and the gardens were inevitably much reduced in scale and quality of care. The pre-war 14 gardeners became 1 + family, and they were responsible for holding the tide of neglect at bay as far as possible.
In 1979, the gardens were gifted to a charitable trust, Howick Trustees Ltd., who now run them. This reversed the process of decline and much of the former areas have been recovered. The charity funds the dedicated team of five gardeners who now look after them.
From 1985, the present Lord Howick has been on annual expeditions to collect wild seed in different parts of the temperate world for the arboretum which will formally open in April 2006. The ten expeditions to Sichuan in south-west China, and another to Hokkaido in Japan, have been under the leadership of Kew Gardens, while Howick has a special relationship with Quarryhill Botanical Garden in California who have participated in most of the expeditions and generously funded all the Chinese ones. One spin-off from them has been the herbaceous seeds collected incidental to the arboretum, and the plants from these are concentrated around a small pond to the north-west of the house. And planting still goes on! Come and see us.
