The Versailles of the North
Derry Moore for The New York Times
The Duchess of Northumberland has spent nearly a decade creating one of the most ambitious public gardens created in Europe since World War II. More Photos >
ALNWICK, England
“THE criticism I’ve had is just massive,” said the Duchess of Northumberland, as she led a visitor through the Bamboo Labyrinth of Alnwick Garden. “It’s really staggering the way that Britain views this project. They said I am to gardens what Imelda Marcos is to shoes.”
Given that the project in question is, so far, a garden of 14 acres — large, but not enormous by the standards of English country estates — the duchess, 49, might seem to be laying it on a bit thick. But what she has done with these 14 acres at Alnwick Castle, her husband’s ancestral home — and what she hopes to do with them in the future, and the money that all this involves — has indeed stirred controversy, in worlds as diverse as the English gardening establishment, the British Parliament and the press. What started as a whim of the new duchess, who saw a chance to create a modern counterpoint to the adjacent 18th-century landscape designed by Lancelot (Capability) Brown, has become one of the most ambitious public gardens created in Europe since World War II, a rollicking tourist attraction widely known as the Versailles of the North. And the duchess, in her single-minded drive to make that happen, has amassed plenty of admirers, but more than a few critics as well.
The saga began in 1995, when the duchess, then 36 and known as Jane Percy, was living with her husband, Ralph, a 38-year-old property surveyor, and their four children in a farm house half an hour north of Alnwick (pronounced ANN-ick). That October Mr. Percy’s brother Harry, the 11th Duke of Northumberland, was found dead in Londonfrom an overdose of amphetamines. Ralph Percy was suddenly the 12th duke, with holdings that included 120,000 acres of land, 171 tenant farms and 700 houses and cottages, along with Alnwick Castle, with its collections of Meissen china, Louis XIV furniture and paintings by Titian, Caneletto and Van Dyke. According to The Sunday Times of London, the duke is the 270th richest person in Britain, with a fortune estimated at £300 million.
“It was a total change in 24 hours,” the duchess said. “Not because of where we lived; it was the way that people related to you. Even good friends sent me letters saying, ‘I’m furious — now you’re going to change.’ ”
Her husband, she said, warned her that there would be challenges. “He said, ‘Don’t expect to win, you’ve just got to do your best,’ ” she said. “I thought, What’s he talking about? He’s being such a drama queen.” Now, though, she sees the troubles she had with the garden as evidence he was right. “In England, if you’re married to a duke and raise your head above the parapet and do something on this scale, it’s considered to be overly ambitious,” she said. “The attitude is that you should stay in your castle.”
At first, she was just looking for something to do in her new role. On a walk near the castle in late 1995, she wandered with her dogs through the site of the former gardens, a walled enclosure that had been planted for 40 years with spruce trees, part of a commercial lumber business that helped support the estate. She had grown up around greenery in Scotland — her mother was an avid gardener — and had occasionally helped friends design gardens “for fun”; now she began talking with her husband about reviving the gardens at Alnwick.
Even at this early stage, she wasn’t thinking small: “To do anything,” she told the duke, “I’m going to need a million pounds.” But over the next year, her vision became grander, expanding to encompass a public garden that would draw visitors from all over the country. The duke eventually put in £8 million (about $12 million at the time) through his charitable trust, half in the form of a loan, and the duchess embarked on a fund-raising campaign that is still ongoing.
She also became increasingly determined that the garden should be modern, not a recreation of Alnwick’s long-derelict 18th- and 19th-century gardens — a decision, she said, that would lead to the first of her troubles.
In 1996, after meeting with designers, including several well-known British traditionalists, she hired Jacques Wirtz, a Belgian landscape architect considered by some the modern equivalent of André Le Nôtre, the designer of the gardens at Versailles. Mr. Wirtz is known for a critically acclaimed redesign of the Carrousel Garden in the Tuileries in Paris, and for redoing the gardens of Élysée Palace, the residence of French presidents.
He delivered a formal plan for the garden in 1997 that has been little altered since. It included prominent features of the present garden like the Grand Cascade, a multitiered hillside waterfall and fountain that is the visual centerpiece of the site; a formal ornamental garden with water rills that contains one of the largest collections of European plants in Britain; a Rose Garden with 3,000 roses in 180 varieties; a Serpent Garden with swirling yew hedges and eight stainless steel water sculptures by William Pye, an English sculptor; the Bamboo Labyrinth, with 500 bamboo plants; a $7 million treehouse built amid 17 lime trees, with an education center, a restaurant that seats 80 people and thousands of square feet of suspended walkways; and the Poison Garden, a spooky fenced-off area with about 100 varieties of toxic plants, as well as cannabis and opium poppies.
Before any of this could be built, the duchess faced a challenge from English Heritage, the government agency charged with protecting England’s architectural patrimony, which wanted a garden in the style of a 19th-century redesign of the original. She spent much of 1998 and 1999 and some £500,000 on research and legal fees in making her case, she said. (Asked about the office’s objections to her plans, Rory O’Donnell, a historic buildings inspector for English Heritage, replied only that it did approve a final plan for the garden in May 1999.)
Other challenges came in the form of criticism of the design, particularly its populist bent. There is little question that children, whom the duchess identifies as one of her main constituencies, enjoy this aspect of the garden: On a recent visit, as gaggles of them ran up and down water rills, splashing each other, a little boy shouted to the duchess that the Poison Garden was his favorite feature (and he had not even seen the mock heroin addicts who performed outside it last year as an object lesson for schoolchildren). But some serious gardeners were less convinced. In 2003, after the first of the three phases was complete (the second was finished last year), Mary Keen, a garden designer and critic, described the place in The Daily Telegraph as “popular entertainment, the dream of a girl who looks like Posh and lives at Hogwarts” — references to Victoria Beckham and to Hogwarts School, a role played by Alnwick Castle in the first two Harry Potter movies.
The duchess does not take particular issue with this line of attack — “I never wanted to make a beautiful garden for elite gardeners,” she said — even if she ascribes it to narrow-mindedness. “A lot of my ideas come from Las Vegas and Euro Disney,” she said as her tour continued. The phantasmagorical displays of light and water at the Bellagio casino, she added, inspired her plans for the Grand Cascade, and it was at Euro Disney that she discovered the lighting technology she is hoping to introduce in the Labyrinth, with discreet fiber optic wands that will sway with the bamboo, creating a vast nighttime landscape of “bamboo and light moving together, silver and gold.”
But the main controversy surrounding the garden has had to do with the money required to build it — its overall budget now stands at £70 million ($140 million). Only two-thirds of the project, for which ground was broken in 2000, has been built so far, at a cost of £43 million, which, aside from the duke’s £8 million, came from a mix of public financing and private donations. Mary Keen, in another 2003 article, this one for the Spectator magazine, suggested that run-down city parks were more deserving of government help, but that the grants they get average £1.4 million ($2.2 million at that time), as opposed to the £3.45 million the Alnwick project had already received. “Should those who are savvier and nobler than thou,” she asked, “attract so much more money than those who are apparently more deserving?” Other public harangues followed.
The duchess has argued that the garden, which became a charity separate from the duke’s estate in 2003, is well worth its cost to the public, as a boon to a financially troubled region with one of the highest unemployment rates in Britain. She points out that Northumberland’s economic prospects were particularly bleak in 2000, the year work started on the garden.
“When I began, farmers all around here were losing their livelihoods,” the duchess said, referring to that year’s epidemic of foot-and-mouth disease. “And here was I at that stage, spending £5 million to build a cascade. I remember coming in and feeling sick, thinking, how can I be doing this? I felt like Marie-Antoinette.”
“What I didn’t realize,” she continued, “was that the garden would become a focus for regeneration. Those farmers’ wives were baking for the tearoom here.” In one year alone, she said, 100 farmers and other locals applied for planning permission to turn their houses and outbuildings into bed and breakfasts. According to Mr. August, her longtime aide, of 100 local businesses to which a questionnaire was sent, 59 responded, saying they had developed and expanded as a result of the garden.
The garden has certainly outperformed the expectations of a feasibility study conducted by KPMG, the accounting firm, in 1997, which estimated it would attract 67,000 visitors a year — only slightly more than the number of ticket buyers who toured the castle at the time. During its first full year of operation, the garden had 330,000 visitors, and by last year the number had jumped to 625,000.
“Every year the garden’s generating between £40 to £53 million in extra spend for our district,” the duchess said.
(The increase in visitors may also have something to do with the Harry Potter movies, as some locals suggest. And there is general acknowledgment that Alnwick’s economy was boosted by Country Life magazine’s 2002 selection of the town as the best place to live in Britain.)
Mr. August said that when the third phase is complete the garden is expected to create as many as 445 full- and part-time jobs. That final phase includes five new gardens; a huge lighting program; an ice rink that would become a pond during summer months; a huge relaxation facility for bus drivers, to lure them into choosing Alnwick as their stopping point on trips to Scotland; and a $9 million playground with a “safely dangerous” obstacle course designed to be used by both children and disabled adults.
The only hitch is that the duchess still has to raise the not inconsiderable sum of $60 million.
In the last year, she has traveled to Chicago, San Francisco, New York, Australia, New Zealand and Hong Kong to lecture about Alnwick Garden and canvas for financial support.
“Obviously the fund-raising is horrendous,” she said. “So far not a single penny’s come in.”
But she remains hopeful. On Aug. 22, she will visit Long Island to speak to the Southampton Garden Club, and will attend a dinner given by Audrey Gruss, the philanthropic wife of Martin D. Gruss, a New York financier, who has promised to introduce the duchess to other garden lovers.
Speaking of this endless quest, the duchess said: “My husband said, ‘Can you do this? At what price? Will it kill you?’ I said I have to.”
“I never for a second think I won’t finish the garden,” she added. “But I just don’t quite know how.”
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