The plant detectives and the secrets of Scotland's best loved gardens

Now an army of plant detectives charged with uncovering the secrets of some of Scotland’s best loved gardens – a massive project involving counting more than 100,000 individual plants - have identified some of the artist’s original plants.

Introduced to the garden by Hornel more than a century ago, they include a climbing hydrangea that clings to the artist’s studio wall and which he would surely have seen every day as he set to work, a winding and gnarly stemmed Chinese wisteria arch over a main path, and magnolia found growing close to the garden summerhouse.

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All have now been propagated to ensure a living link between Hornel and the garden continues for years to come.

The discovery of the direct link to one of Scotland’s best-known artists was confirmed as teams from the National Trust for Scotland, which cares for Hornel’s former property, enter their second year of a huge inventory of the organisation’s gardens across the country.

The PLANTS project will catalogue every plant, shrub, flower and tree growing within the Trust’s 39 gardens and involves an army of ‘detectives’ armed with thousands of labels and plant tags checking everything from giant redwood trees in the grounds of Alexander ‘Greek’ Thomson’s Holmwood in Glasgow’s southside, to ferns at Haddo House in Aberdeenshire and plants thriving in the Gulf Stream garden microclimate at Inverewe on the north west coast.

Once they have noted every garden’s plants, the teams are cross checking their details against estate archives and even house contents to see how they connect to previous owners and tell their own story of how the estate has evolved.

Fran Culverhouse (PLANTS Project West Inventory Officer) auditing at Broughton House and Garden. (Image: Credit: PLANTS project)

At Broughton House, where Hornel lived with his sister, Tizzy, from 1901 to 1933, the project’s team recorded over 1,000 individual plants, including varieties often found in his paintings and which correspond with his fascination with Japanese horticulture.

Hornel first visited Japan in 1893, at a time when ‘Japonisme’ fashion was at a peak and new opportunities were arising to acquire plants to grow at home, with plant nurseries springing up around the country to meet rising demand from British enthusiasts.

He owned several plant catalogues from the Yokohama Nursery Company and created the garden at Broughton with his sister to reflect the dazzling new plants he’d encountered on his travels.

Within the garden, the team recorded unusual Japanese ferns and herbaceous plants, 20 different species and cultivars of peonies, four species of toad lily from Japan and Japanese water iris, along with distinctive trees such as Japanese snowbell, katsura tree and full moon maple acer.

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While it might be assumed most were a direct result of Hornel and his sister’s garden design because there are no extensive plant records only a handful can claim to have a clear and direct link to the artist.

In the case of the wisteria, confirmation was found in an archived letter to a friend from the artist in which he talks of missing the first time it was due to flower.

Other connections include an orchid named after Hornel’s sister, Dactylorhiza ‘Tizzy Hornell’, which was also found growing in the garden.

Dr Anna Florence, curator of plant collections for the Trust and who is leading the three-year, £1 million PLANTS project alongside Dr Colin McDowall, PLANTS Project Manager, says its first year has uncovered a string of fascinating stories.

“We’ve had some amazing findings during the first phase of the project,” she adds.

“Our gardens are truly unique in that they are home to a plethora of rare and exotic plants. Many are becoming endangered as the global climate crisis worsens, that is why the work that we have been doing is of the utmost importance to ensure these species aren’t lost forever.”

Dr Anna Florence is one of the leaders of the project. (Image: Credit: John Linton)

The project aims to help the organisation better manage and understand threats to plants and trees from diseases, severe weather, storm damage and climate change.

However, the scale of the task is particularly daunting: with 39 gardens across Scotland, the project expects to record an estimated 100,000 plants, while also scouring archive records for clues as to how and why they ended up being planted.

“It’s massive, we are trying not to think about the scale of this,” she adds. “We’re just taking it one at a time and trying not to be totally overwhelmed by it.

“But we can’t tell the stories of what we have got if we don’t know what we have got.

“Plants are a living collection, it’s not like a painting on the wall where you can go back 10 years later and it will still be on the wall. They live, die, breed and sometimes they even move.

“It’s important that we keep accurate records about what we have in gardens and tell people about them. It makes day to day management of gardens easier.”

Knowing the precise location of plants means they can be moved, protected or cuttings taken to propagate new plants should disease or ‘disaster’ strike, she adds.

“If we know we have got a really high proportion of one genus that is at risk of a disease at one garden, we can take steps to safeguard that collection, and take copies of plants and put at other properties so we have a backup,” she adds.

In the first year of the project, the PLANTS team discovered the two giant redwoods in the grounds of Holmwood house parkland, growing alongside a Himalayan deodar cedar. It was the first time the 5-acres site’s plant collection has been documented.

While at nearby Greenbank Garden, gifted to the Trust in 1976, the walled garden alone contains over 3,600 plants as well as important collections of Narcissus and Bergenia.

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The project revealed how the property’s one time owner brought favourite plants with them from a previous home, including a dawn redwood at the front of the house, transplanted in 1962.

The species was only discovered as a living specimen in the Hubei area of China in the 1940s and is thought to have been around five years old when it was brought to the garden.

Lucrezia Rossi (PLANTS Project West Inventory Officer) auditing at Greenbank Gardens. (Image: Credit: PLANTS project)

At Haddo House garden in Aberdeenshire, ‘plant detectives’ found North American species of subalpine fir and mountain hemlock, linked to the 7th Earl of Aberdeen, John Hamilton-Gordon of Haddo House, who served as Governor General of Canada in the 1890s.

Inside the house, porcelain plates dating from his departure from Canada in 1898 and painted with delicate ferns corresponded to plants thriving in the garden’s lush fernery.

While at Threave Garden in Castle Douglas, the project found around 20 cultivars named after or linked to the estate, from a crocus to Korean fir and Sitka spruce, which tell the story of its role as the Trust’s School of Heritage Gardening.

Stuart Brooks, Director of Conservation & Policy at the National Trust for Scotland, said: “We have already made some incredible discoveries that are allowing us to reintroduce species of plants that our gardens were once home to.

“This ambitious project will help us to understand exactly what can be found in our gardens, establish its horticultural importance, and provide the information we need to best look after them, so that many more people can make memories to last a lifetime.”