The new garden at the National Trust’s Beningbrough Hall near York features more than 4,000 perennials, grasses, trees and shrubs from the Mediterranean and similar climate zones around the world from South Africa to South Korea, Chile, China and Australia. The plants in the garden have been selected by award-winning designer Andy Sturgeon to be able to cope better with hotter, drier summers and wetter winters, and will not be watered once they have bedded in. And to help nature, 3,500 of the new plants are on the RHS plants for pollinators list, compared to just 10 in the previous planting scheme for that part of the eight-acre garden at the 18th century Italian-style Baroque hall.
The National Trust said extremes in local weather over the past year have underlined the need to adapt Beningbrough’s garden. And the charity’s head of gardens and parklands, Andy Jasper said the trust hoped visitors would enjoy the garden, but also “be inspired to future proof their own gardens”. He said: “With more intense weather events, including drought and floods, predicted, our gardens need to change to better tolerate extremes.
” Progress to deliver the Mediterranean garden has been held up by the very wet weather in the past year, with rain “almost every day” – an irony which the garden team say is not lost on them. The gravelled Mediterranean garden, created out of an underused grassed area, is framed by red brick walls, and has a series of long low-walls made from loc.