The Subtropical Gardens and the Ilchesters

In 1765 the first Countess of Ilchester laid out a walled kitchen garden for the new house the family had built on the site. The house burned down in 1913 and the family went back to Melbury (a replacement was pulled down in 1934), but the garden stayed and kept growing. The fourth Earl planted the exotics. The valley runs down to Chesil and is sheltered enough that plants grow here which have no business surviving in England. The great storm of 1990 flattened rare specimens, since replaced. The gardens are now twenty acres, Grade I on the register of historic parks and gardens, and in 2012 they won Historic Houses' Garden of the Year, the first subtropical garden to do it.