Hospitalfield Fernery and Glasshouse Café

Hospitalfield stands, according to Wikipedia, on the site of a hospital founded in the 13th century by monks of Arbroath Abbey, and Visit Angus says the land has been gardened for more than 800 years. In the 19th century the painter Patrick Allan-Fraser and his wife Elizabeth Fraser remodelled the house. When he died in 1890 without heirs he left the estate for the promotion of education in the arts, and the house opened as an arts school in 1902, according to Great British Gardens.

The fernery was designed in 1872 by Allan-Fraser as a grotto-like building for a collection of New Zealand tree ferns given to him by Captain Peter Logan. Great British Gardens gives c. 1870; the Historic Environment Scotland record, which listed it in Category B on 11 October 1971 as a “mock ruin containing plant house”, gives “second half of the 19th century”. Visit Angus presents it as the only surviving fernery on Scotland's east coast and one of four buildings of its type in Scotland. Glasshouses, now gone, had also grown exotic fruit and flowers in the garden since the early 19th century.

The fernery fell into ruinous disrepair in the mid-20th century. Caruso St John drew up a masterplan in 2015, and the Heritage Fund awarded £647,000 on 14 June 2016 for the restoration of the glass houses and Victorian fernery. Phase 1 was completed in 2021: the redesigned walled garden, the restored fernery and the café opened to the public on 27 May 2021. In 2026 Hospitalfield received the 34th International Carlo Scarpa Prize for Gardens.

The heritage record describes the fernery as a mock ruin containing a plant house. For Peter St John of Caruso St John it is a two-storey stone structure with a series of grotto cavities, set in the north-west corner of the walled garden and facing south. When the architects arrived it was a cleaned-up ruin: the glass roof had gone and a few ferns grew in the joints of the masonry. With no drawing or picture of the original roof, the team proposed a new glazed covering on steelwork meant to read as contemporary, sketching the building's proportions without rebuilding its timber frame; the architect notes that timber would not be used for a greenhouse today.

The café is a second glasshouse, built against a high south-facing wall where a greenhouse once stood. The fernery roof and the café both use standard horticultural glazing systems, so that the café carries the fernery's language of glass. The team included Simpson & Brown for conservation, David Narro Associates for structure, Max Fordham for services and Chap Construction as contractor. The walls of the double walled garden and the stone create a sheltered microclimate that suits ferns, and the ground floor of the restored fernery is accessible.

Allan-Fraser built the fernery for New Zealand tree ferns, a collection presented to him by Captain Peter Logan. The ferns growing there today were given by the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, and Hospitalfield says that many of them are thought to have belonged to the original collection. Peter St John expected the café to hold some greenery and the ferns to grow into the building over time.

Around the glasshouses, the walled garden was redesigned by horticulturalist Nigel Dunnett with the brief of telling roughly eight hundred years of garden history, from the Benedictine hospital to the present. It includes orchards, meadows, borders and medicinal planting; hornbeam hedges divide the lower garden into small “rooms”, some designed by Dunnett and others left to the local community. A Physic Garden, a quadrant devoted to the site's monastic tradition of medicinal herbs, opened in 2023, and in 2024 wheat and rye were grown in the walled garden, then harvested, threshed, milled and baked into bread. A groundsman and many volunteers look after it.

The fernery and glasshouse café stand inside the walled garden, which visitors enter through a new gate, with the café and fernery beyond it. The ground floor of the fernery is accessible, and a ramp serves the café and gardens. The garden and fernery are free to visit in winter without booking; from April to October a ticket with a booked time slot is required. In the season Hospitalfield also runs guided tours of the walled garden and fernery on set days each month, as well as of the house, which is open only on tours, and of the memorial chapel in Arbroath's Western Cemetery. In Arbroath, Visit Angus lists the Signal Tower Museum, the Arbroath Art Gallery and the walking route from Arbroath to Auchmithie among nearby options.