Bicton Park Gardens Devon
Bicton Park Gardens in East Devon near the village of East Budleigh is one of the finest and most varied historic gardens in the southwest of England, a large garden estate of approximately 63 acres that combines formal gardens of the eighteenth century with Victorian additions, a significant collection of tender and unusual plants and a variety of visitor attractions that make it one of the most comprehensive garden destinations in Devon. The garden was originally laid out in the early eighteenth century in the French formal tradition and subsequently modified, extended and enriched by each successive generation of the Rolle and Clinton families who owned the estate.
The Italian Garden, the formal section nearest the house, represents the best-preserved element of the eighteenth-century layout, with its geometric pattern of beds, clipped hedges, fountains and ornamental statuary creating a French-influenced composition of considerable formality and elegance. The American Garden, created in the Victorian period to house the then-fashionable collection of North American ornamental trees and shrubs introduced to British gardens during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, contains mature specimens of exceptional size including one of the oldest surviving monkey puzzle trees in England.
The Palm House at Bicton, a curved Regency glasshouse of great elegance, is one of the earliest surviving examples of the curved palm house design that preceded the great Victorian iron and glass conservatories and was the direct inspiration for Decimus Burton's Palm House at Kew Gardens. Its survival in original form at Bicton makes it one of the most historically significant garden buildings in Britain.
The extensive woodland garden and pinetum contain a remarkable collection of conifer species, some of them of considerable rarity, and the overall diversity of the garden's plant collection reflects two centuries of enthusiastic and well-resourced plant collecting. A miniature railway, children's play areas and a garden centre add to the family visitor offer.