Wakehurst Place

Wakehurst Place, in the beautiful High Weald of Sussex, is an outstanding botanic garden and conservation area, managed by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

Wakehurst Place has a mild, friendly climate, a high rainfall and moisture-retentive soils, complementing the conditions at Kew and allowing many important groups of plants, unable to be grown successfully at Kew, to flourish here.

In the woodlands, there are trees from the temperate zones of the world. The planting styles range from formal walled gardens by the Mansion, through expansive specimen beds, to waterside and bog gardens. The estate is home to no fewer than four National Collections - hypericums, skimmias, birches and southern beeches.

At Wakehurst Place, there is great emphasis on conservation, with the Millennium Seed Bank - the world's most ambitious conservation project, firmly established; with the Loder Valley Nature Reserve embracing three major types of local habitat; woodland, meadowland and wetland; and the Francis Rose Reserve, probably the first nature reserve dedicated to mosses, liverworts, lichens and filmy ferns (Cryptogams) in Europe.

Here, Wakehurst Place has been divided into convenient areas which, if you move the cursor over them, reveal places of interest. Go to them, and they are dealt with in detail, with links to even greater depth if required.

Choose a zone

Seed Bank Zone

Gardens Zone

Conservation Zone

Woodland Zone

Loder Valley Nature Reserve

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