Trees Gallery - Lake District Index

The Lake District

We visit The Lakes more or less every year, and have managed to take a few photos over the years. Most of our visits have been at Easter time, so deciduous trees are bare, occasionally just coming in to bud, occasionally just blossoming. There are some fine gardens and collections around the Lake District, given their own page accessed from the menu above, as well as many wonderful sculptural, knarled and weather-beaten natives - oak, ash, beech, birch - standing proud in the landscape.

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Acorn bank

Acorn Bank is a National Trust property near Temple Sowerby, just off the A66. Not strictly in the Lake District, but a regular stopping off place on our journeys to the Lakes. There is a medicinal herb walled garden, an orchard, and woodlands which include a working watermill and a hidden gypsum mine. We tend to visit at Easter, so the gardens are lacking colour in most photos shown on this page.

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Aira Force

Aira Force and Gowbarrow Park is a woodland area by the west shore of Ullswater, owned by the National Trust. It was once a pleasure garden designed by the Charles Howard, 11th Duke of Norfolk, who planted many non-native conifers, including this now very tall sitka spruce. The large limb almost at right angles to the main trunk appears to defy gravity.

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Grizedale Forest

Forestry Engand have a visitor centre in Grizedale Forest, near Hawkshead, based around the remaining buildings and garden terrace of Grizedale Hall, which was built by Harold Brocklebank in 1905, passed to the Forestry Commission on his death in 1936, served as a Prisoner of War camp during WWII, and was demolished as too expensive to maintain in 1957. Numerous trails radiate from the Centre, and there is a small tree trail with some information boards.

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Here and there in the Lake District

This is the Chinese Bridge, spanning the River Derwent at the southern end of Derwentwater, leading to the boardwalk through the shore, and eventually on to Cat Bells. There are many fine trees and shrubs in the area, often standing proud in the landscape.

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Holker Hall

Holker Hall boasts 23 acres of formal gardens set within a more informal landscape of interesting trees, shrubs and meadows. They are planted to offer year-round inspiration to casual visitors and keen gardeners alike. Spring is a riot of colour with displays of tulips, daffodils, wallflowers and spring meadows, framed by majestic rhododendrons and magnolias. Summer brings billowing borders packed with colour and exciting tender plants, and wonderful summer flowering trees such as styrax, stewartia and eucryphia. Autumn brings its own show in the stunning autumn colours across the gardens.

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Levens Hall

Levens Hall has the oldest topiary garden in the world, dating from the 1690s, with many specimens over 300 years old. Ten acres of Gardens retain many original features including a surreal and unique collection of ancient box and yew trees, in abstract or geometric shape, rising up from a beautiful display of underplanting, populated with an ever-changing array of 30,000 bedding plants grown in the greenhouses onsite.

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Muncaster Castle

Muncaster is in the western Lake District, about a mile inland from the coastal village of Ravenglass. Its gardens include features designed to take advantage of views of the Esk Valley and the mountains, with 77 acres blending cultivated areas, lawns and woodlands together with play areas and the Enchanted Trail. This wild, woodland garden has banks of colour cascading down the hillsides and ravines surrounding the Castle. Flowering camellias, magnolias and native wild daffodils abound in March but as April turns to May, rhododendrons and azaleas are a riot of colour throughout the gardens.

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Sizergh Castle gardens

Sizergh Castle gardens are registered Grade II. There is a lake, a kitchen garden,a rock garden and estate lands. The rock garden, constructed in the 1920s, is the largest limestone rock garden belonging to the National Trust, and has a number of mature acers and conifers. Sizergh houses part of the National Collection of ferns, which are to be seen in the rock garden, the stumpery and the orchard. We visited on a very wet day at the beginning of April, so did not venture far. Also there were no labels, apart from on the orchard trees, (come on NT - let's have more labelling!) so there is some guesswork on the photo descriptions below.

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Wray Castle

Wray Castle is a National Trust property on the West shore of Lake Windermere. It has large grounds leading down to the lake, including a Specimen Tree Trail with a dozen mature, large, unusual trees (not all of which I managed to photograph, not having found the Tree Trail leaflet in time.). Many of the trees were planted by the Dawson family in the 1860s. Wray Castle is accessed down narrow lanes, and can be a bit tight for parking.