Gardens-Guide.com is the premiere open gardens directory in Britain today.
Please check with garden owners or their website to confirm current dates open
Park: All year, dawn to dusk
Garden, Shop & Restaurant:
1st Jan - 16th Feb; Sat - Wed; 11am - 4pm
19th Feb - 30th Oct; daily; 10:30am - 5pm
31st Oct - 24th Dec; Sat & Sun; 11am - 4pm
Open BH Mons and Good Fri. Open Saturday to Thursday during local half-term, Easter and school summer holidays. Last admission 30 minutes before closing.
Home Farm, garden, restaurant and shops: open daily 1 to 5 January and 27 to 31 December
Yes Tours Menus Themes
Hall: 19th Feb - 20th Jul; Sat - Wed; 11am - 5pm
23rd Jul - 1st Sep; Sat - Thurs
3rd Sep - 30th Oct; Sat - Wed.
Home Farm: 1st Jan - 13th Feb; Sat & Sun; 11am - 4pm
19th Feb - 30th Oct; daily; 10.30am - 5pm
5th Nov - 24th Dec; Sat & Sun; 11am - 4pm
Gift Aid Admission (Standard Admission prices in brackets)
Hall, garden and farm: adult £14.70 (£13.30), child £8 (£7.20), family £38.70 (£35).
Hall and garden: adult £9.80 (£8.90), child £5.50 (£4.90), family £28.50 (£25.80).
Garden only: adult £4.10 (£3.70), child £2.20 (£2).
Farm only: adult £8 (£7.20), child £5.50 (£4.90), family £24.90 (£22.60).
Farm (members): adult £3.95 (£3.55), child £2.60 (£2.35), family £12.20 (£11).
Reduced rate when arriving by bicycle or public transport
Dogs on lead in Park.
Formal Garden with parterre, informal Pleasure Grounds with daffodils and rare & unusual trees. Working walled kitchen garden with restored glasshouses. 18th century Model Farm designed by Sir John Soane. Grand Avenue (2.5 miles), Gothic Tower, serpentine lakes and Chinese Bridge.
Juglans (walnut trees)
Cambridge Royston
After visiting the West Garden with its fine specimen trees and the Dutch Garden with its beds of anemones and fuchsia, the visitor arrives at the Victorian parterre, laid out in the pattern of a Union Jack. This is ringed by topiary yews and original stone vases and lead urns. To the North-East of the house, enclosed by a ha-ha, lie the 19th century Pleasure Grounds with good specimen trees, including redwoods, holm/evergreen oaks and a spectacular Cornelian Cherry.
Around the edge of the Walled Garden is the National Collection of walnuts. In this area is a beautiful display of daffodils and wild flowers. The Walled garden is gradually being restored and its layout will shortly have box hedging surrounding the fruit trees and vegetable beds. The glasshouses have recently been completed as a replica of Sir John Soane's original design found in the Soane Museum in London.
Wimpole provides almost a case-book history of English Gardening from 1690 to 1830. The contributions of successive generations were, broadly speaking, five main periods of activity. From 1693 to about 1700, the 2nd Earl of Radnor created an elaborate formal garden, perhaps designed by the Royal London gardeners, London and Wise, to the North of Sir Thomas Chichley's seventeenth century house. This was greatly extended to the South by Charles Bridgeman, working for Lord Harley in the 1720s, with a system of great axial avenues and a series of canalised ponds, woods disposed with serpentine paths leading to 'cabinets', bastions and ha-has similar to those at Stowe.
The naturalisation of the Wimpole landscape was begun with the 1st Earl of Hardwicke who, between 1749 and 1754, employed Robert Greening to grass over the old parterre beds on the north side of the house and it was he who designed the original Walled Garden to the North East of the house (since demolished.) In 1767 Capability Brown was employed by the 2nd Earl of Hardwicke to further naturalise the landscape with belts of trees, turning the fishpond into serpentine lakes and building the Gothic Tower on Johnson's Hill, which was designed years earlier by Sanderson Miller. The last important changes to the landscape were made by Humphry Repton for the 3rd Earl of Hardwicke between 1801 and 1809, further naturalising the landscape. The glasshouses were originally built between 1790-1794 to a design by Sir John Soane, but were demolished by a bomb in November 1941.