Acorn Bank

When you visit us at Acorn Bank, you cannot miss our gardens. We have an incredible herb garden with over 250 varieties of herbs, plus hot beds, vegetable patches and wonderful traditional fruit orchards, all waiting to be explored.
A potted history

The 17th-century walls shelter the National Trust's largest collection of medicinal and culinary plants in our fascinating herb garden; the traditional orchards are carpeted with wildflowers and surrounded by herbaceous borders.

Beyond the walls, the new orchard contains a growing collection of local apples.

A series of small linked gardens celebrates continuous development and adaption over at least 350 years. The first brick-lined walls date from around 1650, enclosing a productive vegetable garden with a smaller area for fruit growing protected by a wall heated with the flue gases from three fires.

By the 1830s the emphasis had moved towards ornamentation and fruit production with the now lost lower garden made on the banks of Crowdundle Beck for vegetables.
Dorothy's legacy

Dorothy Una Ratcliffe carried on this work in the 1930s and ’40s with a walled garden full of fruit and flowers adding new and salvaged ornamental ironwork and statuary, creating a wildflower and bird reserve on the bank behind the house and a pond on land between the house and watermill.

Daffodils and apple trees were protected from the wartime dig for victory plough by making a new vegetable growing area adjacent to the walled garden.