RHS Garden Wisley is one of the world’s great gardens, packed with horticultural inspiration.RHS Garden Wisley is one of the world’s great gardens, packed with horticultural inspiration.

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The Walled Gardens

Wisley’s sheltered Walled Gardens house two distinct schemes: one shows creative alternatives to box, the other puts foliage to the fore

Looking its best in...

Spring In the Walled Garden West, the emerging hosta leaves look most dramatic in April/May.
Winter Both Walled Gardens look dramatic in winter especially with the unusual evergreen content of both plantings.

Walled Garden East – thinking outside the box

Walled Garden East, nearest the Jellicoe Canal, features an attractive parterre that demonstrates and trials a range of alternatives to traditional Buxus (box) hedges.

Wisley - and many home gardeners - have experienced problems with blight on box plants and box tree moth caterpillars. As a result, there are few box plants left in the garden.

The scheme features evergreen and semi-evergreen dwarf shrubs planted in a latticework layout. All have small foliage for better clipping and a closer resemblance to box.

‘Over the coming years, if we do not feel some of the selections earn their place in this display, they will be removed and we will try different cultivars,’ said Curator Matthew Pottage. ‘We are quite confident some of the Berberis (barberry), Lonicera (honeysuckle) and Podocarpus will perform well, but other genera are more of an experiment.’

Creative ways with foliage

The rear Walled Garden West shows the creative effects that can be created with foliage plants. Hostas (plantain lilies) are the backbone of the planting, including some 50 cultivars not before grown at Wisley – look for Hosta ‘Praying Hands’, with its narrow, upright leaves and H. ‘White Feather’, with pure white emerging foliage.

Alongside the hostas are yew topiary cones for winter structure, grasses, unusual slow-growing Taxus baccata ‘Amersfoort’ (yew) and several large Trachycarpus fortunei (Chinese windmill palm), which remain from the area’s previous tropical-themed planting scheme.

We wanted to showcase the many foliage textures and leaf forms in this part of the garden, to show a garden with few flowers can still be equally as beautiful as those full of flowers.

Best viewed in early summer when the planting is at its best, take inspiration from the many hosta cultivars, several of which are new introductions. Our favourite is Hosta ‘Empress Wu’ which has enormous leaves!
RHS Garden Wisley Horticulturist

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