Inverewe Garden Highland
Inverewe Garden near Poolewe in Wester Ross is the most extraordinary horticultural achievement in Scotland, a garden of over 2,500 plant species created by Osgood Mackenzie from 1862 onward on a bare peninsula of Torridonian sandstone on the shores of Loch Ewe, the warming influence of the North Atlantic Drift allowing the cultivation in the open air of plants from the Himalayas, South America, the Southern Ocean islands and New Zealand that could not survive the Scottish climate without the exceptional shelter and warmth provided by this specific location at a latitude comparable to Moscow and Labrador. The National Trust for Scotland manages the garden.
Mackenzie's achievement was to shelter the exposed and windswept peninsula from the Atlantic gales using a windbreak of Scots pine and other trees, then to create a series of gardens within the shelter of the windbreak that exploited the warmth of the Gulf Stream current to support an extraordinary collection of plants from the world's temperate and subtropical zones. The planting developed over sixty years by Mackenzie and subsequently expanded by his daughter Lady Mairi Sawyer into the collection of approximately 2,500 species visible today.
The garden's position on the shores of Loch Ewe provides a magnificent backdrop of sea and mountain against which the exotic planting creates a visual contrast of remarkable quality. The Himalayan plants growing on the shore of a Scottish sea loch, with the mountains of Wester Ross visible across the water, create an experience of horticultural wonder available nowhere else in Scotland.