Garden Portrait: Drummond Gardens

OCTOBER is the month to share your favourite gardens.

(This month share with us what is special about your favourite garden. Why do you like it? When is it at its best? And how do we get there. Of course you may wish to share your own garden in which case unless you open it to the public, keep the actual location private. )

Drummond Gardens are Scotland’s most important formal gardens and amongst the finest in Europe. Set below the castle walls and surrounded by woodland, rolling countryside and the Ochil Hills to the east they were laid out in 1630 by John Drummond, 2nd Earl of Perth, but took their present format almost two hundred years later. As you enter the courtyard there is no indication of the grandeur to come.

A tiny room on the right of the arched entrance is the ticket office – no fancy gift shop or tea-room here. And then you move to the garden entrance at the top of the terraces.

The design is the Saltaire, the Saint Andrew’s Cross of Scotland, incorporating within the axis the multi-faceted obelisk sundial, built by John Mylne in 1630. The box hedges within the cross contain the Coats of Arms of the Drummond and Willoughby families.

The sundial shows the time in different countries

A view of the castle from the garden

The garden is designed to be viewed from the terraces as once you are on the ground the layout is difficult to see.  The red and yellow roses represent the Drummond colours.

Of course a formal garden like this must include much statutory. Cute cupids, Greek gods and goddesses, animals…

The garden includes fourteen species of Maples so colour in spring and autumn is guaranteed as well as a beautiful copper beech planted by Queen Victoria in 1842 and dozens of deciduous trees and shrubs.

Acer palmatum ‘Atro purpurea’

Holly

Acer shirasawanum ‘Aureum’

At the rear of the garden behind a wall is the kitchen garden with 21 varieties of apples trained to grow up the walls, fruit beds, vegetable beds, roses, dahlias and a glass house filled with pelargoniums, Achimenes, plumbago and a grape-vine.

And once again I was pleasantly surprised at the amount of colour in a garden this far north and in mid-September.

Herbaceous border

Poppy heads

Nasturtium

Sedum with bees

Helenium

White Ox-eye daisies

Antirrhinum

Drummond Gardens are located at Muthill, nr Crieff, Perthshire, Scotland PH7 4HZ and even if you are not a fan of the formal garden it really is worth a visit to view something so unique in the UK. And if you go to the web site there is a lovely video on the Picture Gallery page which uses a drone to take you soaring above the gardens so you can see it all.

If you would like to join in with Garden Photography then please take a look at my Garden Photography Page. No complicated rules 🙂

• Create your own post and title it October: A Garden Portrait
• Include a link to this page in your post so others can find it too
• Add the tag “GardenChallenge” so everyone can find the posts easily in the WP Reader
• Get your post in by the end of the month, as the new theme comes out on the first Sunday in November.
• Please visit the sites in the comments to see what others are posting.

This is the last week for showing me your favourite gardens, next Sunday we begin the penultimate month of the challenge (how quickly the year passes) with Trees, leaves, woods, forests, and fungi – autumnal if you like though any time of year is quite alright by me.

As usual I appreciate everyone who has visited me this month to like and/or comment on my posts and a special thank you to those who linked their favourite gardens to mine so that we could all visit them too. I really enjoy my virtual garden walks.