As you enter through the gatehouse arch at Broadwoodside, the centre of the first of two courtyards is dominated by an imposing iroko aviary, modelled on the fruit cages designed by Arabella Lennox-Boyd for the Rothschilds at Ascott House in Buckinghamshire. This is the summer home to William, an African grey parrot, who has been in residence since the Dalrymple family — Robert, Anna and their four children — moved here in 2000. The archway and an ogee-roofed pavilion in the corner of the second, which were among their additions, gently meld with the buildings of a once-dilapidated former steading dating back to the 17th century.
Mr Dalrymple is a book designer of some renown who has worked with many of the world’s leading publishers and galleries. If one were comparing him to a bird, it would be a gimlet-eyed magpie, picking up ideas, both artistic and horticultural, and shamelessly transporting them back to his nest just outside Gifford in East Lothian. Possessed of an enquiring mind and a penchant for a play on words, as well as fingers turned deep green from more than 25 years of planning and planting the garden (indeed, it first featured in Country Life on February 22, 2007). It is also clear that he is not a man who takes himself too seriously.
The gazebo — or Mughal pavilion as the Dalrymples prefer to think of it — is from Stuart Garden Architecture and was erected for their ruby wedding anniversary.
Near William’s quarters, he points out a large gnarled and desiccated branch of native juniper. ‘It succeeds entirely as a Louise Bourgeois spider,’ he says, in the fruity cadences he shares with his historian brother William (after whom the chatty parrot was named), punctuated with barks of cheery laughter.
‘From whatever angle you look at it, it has a satisfactory composition. I thought I had taken pretentiousness to a new level, but actually it has gone down well with the general audience.’
We move on to a column of wood cubes alternating with short rods of glass supporting a glass sphere, which has burnt the wood below it through the sun’s refractions. ‘My daughter did a course at the furniture school down the road [Chippendale International School of Furniture] and I found these glass bars. She drilled the wood and we assembled it together; it does a Roger Ackling.’
Other gleaned examples around the garden include A Load of Balls (literally, a pile of plastic, stone and glass spheres, inspired by fashion designer Dries Van Noten’s father’s garden in Belgium) and the Three Sisters, made from leftover roofing slates and inspired by an installation at the Hannah Peschar Gallery in Surrey by Herta Keller. ‘The writing is on the wall’ (indeed it is) is inscribed in the loggia, used for feasting à la Balthazar on warm summer days, and, placed along a grassy path, a stone tablet displays ‘Ore stabit fortis arare placeto restat’, a donnish joke best read in English.
Foxgloves bring some seasonal colour to an otherwise green scene in the upper courtyard at Broadwoodside. The pair of bronze pigeons is by Shona Kinloch.
The garden cannot escape an intellectual nod to the late Ian Hamilton Finlay’s creation at Little Sparta, a mere 40 miles away. Yet this is no pastiche, as, together with the buildings new and old, each area makes sense in its context and has a harmony and lightness of touch that comes together as something traditional, yet deeply personal and original.
Mr Dalrymple’s design background is the presiding genius here and the layout is strongly linear, with repetition, rhythm and symmetry being key and each sightline considered, whether along a path to a focal point within the garden or out into the arable land and woods beyond. He uses the layout of these buildings or existing farm walls as the frames. ‘It is somehow less fanciful than simply dividing up a big garden into rooms.’
The first courtyard, with Palazzo William at its centre, was created so there is always some-thing pleasing to look out at from the house, even during long, dreich Scottish winters. It was inspired by John Stefanidis’s garden in Dorset and is laid with a chequerboard of 25 squares of cobbles, grass and neatly clipped evergreens, such as box, rosemary and teucrium, coloured seasonally by alliums and grasses, and self-seeders, including foxgloves and Verbena bonariensis, out of which rise hard clipped standard Norway maples. Mr Dalrymple admits mistakes were made in the early days. ‘We moved to a building site and I thought: “that will be depressing”, so I spent quite a lot of money on mature prunus trees that I had read about in a Penelope Hobhouse book. They had been in about six months and got canker and died. These are the replacements.’
A striking red gate leading to a long beech walk is flanked by urns from Oka. The plinth on the left reads ‘Going to’ and the right ‘the Dogs’, as the gates lead to the pet cemetery.
The next hortus conclusus, beyond a low wall and reached down a step to further emphasise the change of scene, has a more child-conducive central lawn (there are now nine grandchildren), traversed by a cruciform flagstoned path. To the north is the ‘thug bed’, filled with the likes of eupatorium, macleaya and Japanese anemones. Against the sunny west-facing wall is another opportunity for a joke, ‘blackberry and apple’: Rubus fruticosus ‘Oregon Thornless’ and Estivale apples, purchased from Crocus in a sale for their formal, goblet-trained bush, but, in fact, ‘the best-tasting apple we have’.
Although Mr Dalrymple’s disciplined hand is to be seen in the repeated plantings, the symmetrical vistas, the avenue of fastigiate hornbeams that were a present from his grandmother and the pollarded circle of willows near the drive, Mrs Dalrymple does get a look in. ‘She always wants more flowers. It is a creative tension,’ he admits, with another bark of laughter. ‘It is the Vita and Harold cliché. I do the straight lines; she does the abundance.’
There is great abundance in the Hall Garden, including nepeta, phlomis, Iris sibirica, the Scotch rose Rosa spinosissima and R. rugosa.
There are, indeed, flowers aplenty, especially in the kitchen garden, at the centre of which is a long formal pond, and areas such as the Hall Garden, on either side of a path leading from the drive to a large room used for parties and tour groups, which has something more of the sweet disorder favoured by Mrs Dalrymple. Limes that started off with the intention of being pleached, then turned into pompoms are now parasol-trained to shade the path. As to the planting, ‘it is really a free for all,’ says Mrs Dalrymple. ‘It starts off quite orderly in March, with a complete covering of scillas. Then you get Euphorbia epithymoides and yellow tulips and then brunnera and then it starts to become the law of the jungle.’
Order may yet prevail, as the Hall Garden has just been refreshed and replanted by Nanette Wraith, who replaced Guy Donaldson last year after he’d spent 25 years as the gardener. Do the two have plans for any new areas? ‘No bigger, thank you,’ says Mrs Dalrymple firmly.
Broadwoodside welcomes visitors by appointment, and on selected days for the National Garden Scheme — see more details at the website.
This feature originally appeared in the print edition of Country Life on June 24, 2026. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.