The Story Behind the Stay: The Walled Gardens

One of the most beautiful parts about staying at Abbotsford is having exclusive after-hours access to roam the gardens.

Sir Walter Scott’s imagination and creativity extended beyond the walls of his home into the surrounding landscape, where he created beautiful formal gardens.

Each garden at Abbotsford is distinct in character; taken together, they form three outdoor ‘rooms’ designed to offer picturesque settings for the main house. The gardens we see today are still fundamentally Scott’s work, though with certain alterations carried out by his descendants to adapt the space to the family's changing needs.

Forestry and tree-planting were Scott’s great outdoor passions, but he also embraced landscape design on a smaller scale.

Across three walled gardens, Scott laid out the horticultural equivalent of one of his novels: a series of distinctive garden compartments or ‘chapters’ blending the modern with the antiquarian, the picturesque with the functional.

The Gardens and wider estate also offered Scott the ideal ‘antidote to hours of desk-bound writing’, particularly following the financial crash of 1826 and his efforts to write his way out of crushing debts.

Scott borrowed and experimented with horticultural ideas and practical recommendations from the day’s leading theorists and experts. He engaged gardening staff through his friend, the Duke of Buccleuch, whose gardens at Dalkeith Palace in Midlothian were widely admired for their inventiveness and productivity.

Scott was a pragmatic gardener, open to new technology and keen to establish systems of good practice. His planting schemes at Abbotsford paid heed to the age-old principles of positioning, aspect and shelter to counter the whims of the Scottish climate. He also spent lavish sums on a radical and ultimately unsuccessful system of ‘hot walls’ where portions of the walled gardens were heated with hot air ducted into the garden to enable delicate plants and exotic fruit trees to grow.

The conservatory he built is quaintly gothic in style (possibly modelled on a medieval jousting pavilion tent), but it also incorporated the latest systems of roofing, glazing and heating. Scott claimed no special expertise in botany, but his library did contain excellent collections of texts on horticulture, and he was also quick to exploit the access he had to authoritative gardening know-how through his fame and elite social connections.

Though Scott’s tenure at Abbotsford was relatively brief, it does seem likely that he would recognise the gardens today as his own. The developments that have taken place since his death, though continual and in some places quite sweeping, have nevertheless done much to preserve and enhance a creative legacy that still has the facility to surprise and delight.

Experience a stay where history was made. Visit our Stay website for further details.