Biddulph Grange Garden

**Biddulph Grange Garden**
	Biddulph Grange Garden
Staffordshire
National Trust
Grid reference:	SJ895591
	Information

Biddulph Grange is a National Trust landscaped garden spread over 15 acres in Biddulph near Stoke-on-Trent in Staffordshire.

Description

One journalist wrote of the garden:

Behind a gloomy Victorian shrubbery there's a gloomy Victorian mansion, but behind that lurks one of the most extraordinary gardens in Britain...it contains whole continents, including China and Ancient Egypt - not to mention Italian terraces and a Scottish glen."^[1]

The garden is planted with flora from around the world, and bursting into colour in turn in due season; in springtime the azaleas and rhododendrons dazzle and in the summer the summer flowers open ni an array of hues. The abundant everygreens ensure colour all year round.

The National trust have installed things for children (and adults of youthful disposition) in tunnels and rockeries. A children's quiz trail is provided.

It has been appreciated how the creators of the garden worked the theme:

"Cooke and Bateman hid the different areas of the garden from each other, using heaps of rocks and thickly planted shrubberies' the design locks together as tightly as a jigsaw or a cross-section of the brain."^[1]

It is not a flat garden and instead its small flower beds are arrayed in terraces linked with steps and walks. In the Egyptian part of the garden and two sphinxes guarding the entrance to a dark tunnel inside which is chamber lit with blood-red light in which squats the figure of the Ape of Thoth.^[1]

Garden features

The garden is divided into many different areas with themes including:

China
Egypt
Western Terrace
Italian Garden
Lime Avenue
Rhododendron Ground
The Glen
Pinetum and Arboretum
Bowling green and Quoit Ground
Cheshire Cottage
Wellingtonia Avenue
The Stumpery
Dahlia Walk
Lower, Rose, Verbena and Araucaria Parterres
Cherry Orchard

The China area is modelled after the willow pattern plate.

History

The house at Biddulph Grange was built as a rectory but around 1840 it was bought by [[James Bateman (1811–1897), the accomplished horticulturist and landowner; he inherited money from his father, who had become rich from coal and steel businesses. He moved to Biddulph Grange around 1840, from nearby Knypersley Hall and set about creating the gardens, with the aid of his friend and painter of seascapes Edward William Cooke. The gardens were meant to display specimens from Bateman's extensive and wide-ranging collection of plants.

Bateman bought specimens brought back by the great Victorian plant-hunters and became an expert on orchids.

Bateman was president of the North Staffordshire Field Society, and served on the Royal Horticultural Society's Plant Exploration Committee. The gardens were meant to display specimens from Bateman's extensive and wide-ranging collection of plants. He especially loved Rhododendrons and Azaleas. Bateman was a collector and scholar on orchids. He had a number of notable sons who grew up at Biddulph Grange, including the painter Robert Bateman. His gardens are a rare survival of the interim period between the Capability Brown landscape garden and the High Victorian style. The gardens are compartmentalised and divided into themes: here Egypt, China and others.

In 1861 Bateman and his sons, who had used up their savings, gave up the house and gardens, and Bateman moved to Kensington in Middlesex. Robert Heath bought Biddulph Grange in 1871. After the house burnt down in 1896, architect Thomas Bower rebuilt it.

The house

After 1896 the house served as a children's hospital from 1923 until the 1960s; known first as the "North Staffordshire Cripples' Hospital" and later as the "Biddulph Grange Orthopaedic Hospital" (though it took patients with non-orthopaedic conditions as well. Under this latter title the hospital's role expanded to accommodate adults, continuing in operation into the mid-1980s.) The 15-acre garden became badly run-down and neglected during this period, and the deeply dug-out terraced area near the house around Dahlia Walk was filled in level to make a big lawn for patients to be wheeled out on in summertime. The Bateman property was (and still is) divided: the hospital got the house and its gardens, and the uncultivated remainder of Biddulph Grange's land became the Biddulph Grange Country Park.

For the best part of a century the gardens decayed, visited only by passing vandals and, more rarely, intrepid folly-hunters.^[1]

Restoration

In 1988 the National Trust took ownership of the property and its gardens, which have now been nearly fully restored, including a long work digging out the Dahlia Walk area to find forgotten features.

In 1995/6 the Wellingtonia Walk, which had become postmature and badly gappy, was clear felled and in that year and the next replanted.

As at March 2007, the last bit being restored is the Woodland Terrace, whose site a few years ago was at last rid of a hospital ward building and is still intruded on by houses.

The feature known as the Great Wall of China has been rebuilt to cure the effects of long-term subsidence; the work was finished in 2010-2011 winter.

A meandering walk route called the Woodland Walk was laid out in time for the 2011 season, in the woods to the left side of the Wellingtonia Walk (looking outward).

In 2011 they started planting bulbs and early-summer bedding in Dahlia Walk to cover before the dahlias come into flower.