Visit the walled garden at Benton End

The revival of a hidden garden

This summer we celebrated a major milestone in our project to restore and revive Cedric Morris’ walled garden in Suffolk, and opened for a limited number of garden open days in June and July 2026.

Over the last three years, with the help of over 300 individual Benton End supporters Head Gardener, James Horner, has worked sensitively across the gardens at Benton End. Most recently, in creative collaboration with Sarah Price Landscapes, they have focussed on a sympathetic but contemporary plan for the walled garden’s renewal. Since August, we’ve worked to landscape the walled garden; making new, accessible paths, building walls, waste-cast pots and furniture, and refreshing ‘Cedric’s pond’ with new water delivery and retention systems.

Early visitors were just in time to see our collection of Cedric Morris irises in bloom – find out more on the project here: Sarah Cook’s search for Cedric Morris irises

The history of Benton End

Benton End was home to The East Anglian School of Painting & Drawing and its founders: artist-plantsman Cedric Morris and artist Arthur Lett-Haines.

In the 1950s, artist and horticulturalist Cedric Morris created Britain’s first naturalistic garden within the old walls of Benton End, a Tudor manor house in Hadleigh, Suffolk. The walled garden had lain abandoned since 1983, and closed to the public. Miraculously, though, Cedric’s rare collection of bulbs has survived, slumbering under the earth for forty years.

In 2021 Benton End was majority gifted to the Garden Museum by the Pinchbeck Charitable Trust with the intention that the house and garden might be restored and re-opened as a place of learning once again.