United Kingdom: Surrey – Wisley RHS Gardens

☀️ Hot, Tired and Grateful for a Glasshouse: A Morning at RHS Wisley

It was, by all accounts, another scorcher. The kind of day the weather forecasters get inexplicably excited about, practically rubbing their hands together on the telly as they pointed at lurid orange maps and muttered darkly about broken records. You’d think they’d been waiting all year for this, which I suppose they had.

We hadn’t much time left in the area — we were staying in Dormansland, a small village sitting just on the Surrey-Kent border, the sort of quiet, leafy place where nothing much happens and everyone seems perfectly content with that arrangement. Given the heat, the sensible thing would have been to stay put, draw the curtains and sit in front of a fan with a cold drink. We are, however, not always sensible people. So we pointed the car towards Wisley, near Woking in Surrey, home to the Royal Horticultural Society’s flagship garden, and off we went. Stiff upper lip and all that. Or possibly sunstroke. It’s hard to tell the difference sometimes.

Wisley is, it’s worth saying upfront, not a recent invention. The place has genuine history behind it, which I always find rather reassuring. It began life in 1878 when a Victorian businessman by the name of George Ferguson Wilson acquired a roughly sixty-acre plot of land known as Glebe Farm, not far from the River Wey in Surrey. Wilson was a man of means and ambitions, which in the Victorian era was a combination that tended to produce either great things or spectacular disasters. In this case, it produced a garden. With some assistance from Gertrude Jekyll — one of the most influential garden designers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, responsible for laying out gardens all over Britain and beyond, often in collaboration with the architect Edwin Lutyens — Wilson set about creating what he called the “Oakwood Experimental Garden.” His stated aim, rather endearingly, was to make difficult plants grow successfully. It’s the sort of goal that sounds modest on paper but in practice requires an enormous amount of effort, money and patience, all of which Wilson apparently had in good supply.

Wilson died in 1902, by which point the garden had established something of a reputation. The following year, a wealthy businessman and philanthropist called Sir Thomas Hanbury stepped in and purchased the site. Hanbury was already well known in horticultural circles for having created the celebrated Giardino Hanbury on the Italian Riviera near Ventimiglia, begun in 1867 and considered one of the finest botanical gardens in the Mediterranean. He clearly had a taste for acquiring and improving gardens, and in 1903 he handed the Wisley estate over to the Royal Horticultural Society, who accepted it with some enthusiasm. The timing was helpful for them: they had recently vacated their old gardens at Chiswick, which they’d held since 1821, and were in need of a new permanent home. Wisley fitted the bill admirably, and the Society has been there ever since, steadily expanding and improving the place across more than a century.

Today, the garden covers around 240 acres, a significant expansion from Wilson’s original sixty, and it draws somewhere in the region of a million visitors a year, making it the second most-visited paid garden in the country. It is, I’m told, beaten only by the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. Which is rather like coming second in a two-horse race, but a perfectly respectable achievement all the same, and nobody at Wisley seems to lose any sleep over it.

Naturally, we managed to time our visit appallingly. We arrived at the height of the afternoon, right when the sun was at its most merciless and the heat was doing its level best to melt the tarmac in the car park. I have a talent for this sort of thing. Much like the day before, when we’d spent a similarly sweltering few hours at Hever Castle in Kent — the childhood home of Anne Boleyn, which we’d managed to visit in the full glare of a day that felt broadly unsuitable for outdoor activity — the sensible members of the public had taken one look at the weather forecast and made different plans. The result was a garden that was quiet, and at times almost eerily so. There is, it turns out, a silver lining to every heatwave, even if it is a fairly small and slightly overheated one.

I fished out my RHS membership card, a thoughtful gift from my daughter Emily, acquired some while back and not used nearly enough to justify it. We strolled in without fuss and found ourselves on the threshold of Seven Acres.

Seven Acres is the broad, gently rolling expanse of lawn you encounter first, dominated by a round ornamental pond and a larger lake beyond it, all laid out in the 1930s during a period of significant development at Wisley. The lake is home to a considerable population of carp, which the RHS notes are popular with children who like to feed them. We had no children with us and no fish food, so we contented ourselves with admiring the water briefly and moving on. The grass was looking somewhat parched, which felt appropriate.