Visit the walled garden at Benton End

The revival of a hidden garden

Our project to restore and revive Cedric Morris’ walled garden in Suffolk is shaping up for a summer in bloom, so we’re opening for a limited number of garden visits this June and July.

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.

Following years of research, we are bringing Cedric’s rare plants back, to sit alongside these new interventions. We will welcome visitors in on open days, similar to Cedric’s ‘Iris Days’ that he would hold each year.

Early visitors may be 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 & its founders: artist-plantsman Cedric Morris & 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.