Wakehurst Place is a visitor attraction just off the M23 in West Sussex. It is owned by the National Trust and managed by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. As National Trust members, we had 'free' admission but had to pay for parking. This is resented by locals in prosperous safe Tory voting areas who object to Kew seeking to make up its budget shortfall, oblivious to the real life consequences of Austerity.
While I was there I noticed a local scheduled service bus turn into the car park to pick passengers up, so that might be worth investigating if you're car free. I wouldn't rely on the National Trust to give you any useful information about car free travel.
Coffee shop - definitely one to avoid. They have captive customers with no competition for miles; this seems to be justification for serving crap. I don't mind paying over the odds for a quality product but do resent it when they can't even provide a half-decent tea bag. National Trust, dedicated to serving poor quality beverages to the undiscerning tastebuds of Middle England.
As a positive, the site is dog free (except for guide and assistance dogs). This should be a thing at more of these places. This was one of several similar visitor attractions I have visited in the past few years which are markedly busier in the café/shop area than the central gardens and significantly busier in the central gardens than in the peripheral woodland areas. This is so predictable that I have created a narrative of people who 'prove' their cultured credentials by boasting how often they go to National Trust-style visitor attractions, but only actually go to the café to drink dubious coffee, or spend ten minutes strolling around the gardens engrossed in conversation. Of course, what other people do is none of my business: an individual may have mobility problems; they may be killing time before they have to be somewhere else. But I am increasingly convinced that the vast majority of people, including those who spend a fortune on gym membership or jogging clothes, don't ever actually walk. I have mentioned before another blogger (and semi-retired GP) who has a theory that few people venture more than '100 metres from the car park'.
If you look for a map of Wakehurst on the Kew Gardens site, you won't find it, unless you search under: Explore > Exploring Wakehurst with children > and scroll right to the bottom for a sentence that reads:
Our Adventurous Journeys play spaces are located throughout the gardens. Find their locations on the Wakehurst visitor map.
Slow handclap for accessibility - here's the direct link.
These places have to market themselves as being child friendly, but I think it's a bit of a con. I don't see this as a place you would want to take kids. If parents want to come and, inevitably, bring their children with them, I think that's great. The children will benefit from looking at the range of gardens and woodland, and simply from being in a different environment, and able literally to expand their horizons. But the marketing seems determinedly child-centric and focused on providing entertainment for children to consume, often quite passively. Fortunately, it being a school day, there was an absence of children.
Whenever I visit gardens such as this I struggle to describe them, and in a sense it would be futile to do so. We started off by looking at the formally planted gardens and the pond close to the mansion and progressed to the Himalayan Glade, but not as far as the lake before walking back through Westwood Valley and the water gardens. After eating our picnic in the car park we finished our day with a walk in the woodlands to the north west of the site. Outside the formal areas we barely saw a soul. I don't have a 'My Tracks' record of the route. Either I forgot to set it or I forgot to turn it off when I got back in the car. But my pedometer suggests I walked about 4.5 miles in total that day.
The weather forecast had been bright and fairly warm, but it turned out to be mainly overcast with a bit of a chilly edge. It threatened rain more than once. It wasn't until after I loaded my photos onto my PC that I remembered I had meant to clean my camera lens, so some photos have a smudge on them. I have struggled for a long time with 'blown out' skies. Later in the summer I hit on a solution to this (exposure, basically!) but on this visit, despite the overcast skies, the photos were all marginally over-exposed - I partly compensated in editing.
Despite the criticisms above I would strongly recommend a visit to Wakehurst. It differs from Wisley or indeed Kew itself in that it doesn't aim so obviously to be educational- much less labelling of plants, for example. I liked the layout of the grounds. always nice to visit somewhere when the rhododendrons and azaleas are blooming, although I always struggle to get decent photos of them: so much colour distorts the lens!
In the more remote part of the grounds we spotted both grouse and pheasant.
Below are some more photos I took, and the rest are in my Sussex photo album.
This blogpost was posted the day after I visited - perhaps we were there at the same time kew in the country – wakehurst place, water gardens, wetland, woodland and wildflower meadows…
A couple more worth looking at
Wakehurst Place, West Sussex
Wakehurst - a garden for all seasons
From the Guardian archive: 15 August 1966: A Kew Gardens in the Sussex countryside
