Biddulph Grange Garden

About the garden

Owned by

National Trust

Biddulph Grange Garden is a formal Victorian masterpiece; a garden of ideas, passionate beliefs and one man’s way of trying to understand the nature of the world. The garden, created by husband and wife, James and Maria Bateman with their friend Edward Cooke between 1842 and 1868, is a compartment garden containing garden ‘rooms’ each with their own microclimates, perfect for the international collection of plants they carefully selected for each space.

Each garden room is discovered by exploring the maze of hedges and venturing through tunnels and across stepping stones. The design is playful and calls for curiosity and adventure, reflecting the Victorian period of discovery and a time of religious and social upheaval. Bateman’s theories on both these subjects are explored in the garden and in the Geological Gallery, once the Victorian entrance to the garden, where a collection of fossils and rocks can be found.

Horticulture was Bateman’s first love and the garden is home to a diverse plant and tree collection from grand Wellingtonia Avenue and the seasonal splendour of the Dahlia Walk, to the architectural majesty of the two miles of clipped yew hedges that provide shelter and walls for the garden room design. The evergreen pinetum gives a spring-like focus to the winter garden; leading the visitor on into the Egyptian Court with its smart yew pyramid and stone sphynx by sculptor Benjamin Waterhouse-Hawkins. It then leads down through one of the oldest stumperies in the country to the splendour of the Chinese Garden whose acers glow gold and red in autumn and which is claimed to be home to the oldest golden larch in Britain.