Orchard House, Cragside Formal Garden

Cragside was the home of the industrialist and inventor William Armstrong (1810-1900), near Rothbury. The shooting lodge built between 1862 and 1865 was enlarged by Richard Norman Shaw in two phases from 1869 to 1882; in 1870 Armstrong installed a Siemens dynamo there, and the house became the first in the world to be lit by hydroelectric power. By the 1880s the gardens and grounds covered some 1,700 acres.

The formal garden, laid out in terraces on a slope away from the house, then held a suite of glasshouses: hothouses for palms and tropical ferns, a display house for prize specimens and the long Top Terrace range, built by Mackenzie and Moncur, hothouse builders and heating and ventilating engineers. In the 1880s the garden opened to the public on Thursdays only. The Orchard House, devoted to fruit trees, dates from the 1870s; the garden team suggests that Armstrong may have designed it himself.

Most of these glasshouses disappeared in the 1920s, and the formal garden was long separated from the estate. The National Trust acquired the house in 1977 but the formal garden only in 1991. In 1993 it dismantled the Orchard House for restoration: all the metalwork was kept, along with about a tenth of the glass, and Sir David Bellamy officially opened it in 1994. A three-yearly maintenance cycle could not hold back timber rot; after a storm in 2018 the glass and pots of the western section went into storage, and the Trust commissioned BFF Architects, with engineers Narro Associates, to lead a new conservation project.

The Orchard House is made up of three sections divided by glazed partitions and timber doors, with a cast-iron frame and timber joinery. Inside, raked stone staging forms three terraces. The trees were grown in sections of earthenware water pipe reused as pots and set on turntables: by rotating them, every side of a tree could be turned to the sun so that it grew evenly.

Heat came from a large coal-fired boiler set seventeen feet down in a basement, with pipes running beneath each of the three terraces; many of them were removed during the Second World War. Ventilation relied on winch-operated roof vents and on small hatches, which also let in pollinating bees.

Listed Grade II, the glasshouse is to keep its rotating pots and cast-iron framework; the conservation scheme also covers the glazing and adds rainwater harvesting, photovoltaic panels and better access, with the aim of making it a public hub for sustainable horticulture. Around the garden, the brick bases of the vanished glasshouses can still be seen.

Built to shelter fruit trees from the harsh Northumberland climate, the Orchard House holds pear, fig and plum trees as well as lemons, and the gardeners prune the pears back each season. The rotating pots remain the most unusual feature of the whole ensemble.

Next door, ferneries hold ferns, water lilies, fish and newts. The formal garden keeps up the Victorian fashion for bedding planted in straight lines and geometric patterns; on the Top Terrace, up to 10,000 foliage plants were once arranged in intricate designs trimmed flat like a carpet. Lower down, the Italian Terrace and its quatrefoil pool close the composition. Elsewhere on the estate, the great rock garden, whose building on steep slopes Margaret Armstrong supervised in person, rounds off this picture of Victorian horticultural taste.

The formal garden has its own car park and can also be reached on foot from the Iron Bridge by a short climb up stone steps. Allow forty-five minutes to an hour; most paths are surfaced. The Clock Tower, built in 1864 in the Gothic Revival style to keep the estate's time and act as an alarm for its workers, overlooks the terraces. The interior of the Orchard House is not always open: closed during recent visits, it can still be seen through its windows. A visit combines well with the house, the rock garden and the lakes of Armstrong's hydroelectric system, such as those at Nelly's Moss.