English Gardening

"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 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.

Read the whole article in the July 17, 2008 edition of the New York Times By CHRISTOPHER MASON by clicking here.