Galloway, that part of south-west Scotland that leans out into the Irish Sea and the warming currents of the gulf stream, defies expectations. A landscape of forests and farmland, moors and mountains, coupled with a coastline harbouring artists’ colonies in villages that would not look out of place in Cornwall, makes for the sort of location that invites creative spirits, not least those with horticultural ambitions.
However, Mary Gladstone, the hand behind the spectacular gardens at Craichlaw House, just outside the small village of Kirkcowan, declares a surprising lack of horticultural ambition; colour and design on the other hand, come very naturally. ‘This is not a specialist’s garden,’ she emphasises. ‘I choose plants that do well here in Galloway, which will offer maximum drama for minimum input.’ Some 30 years of experience have refined and adapted her choice of plants and the way she grows them — and the garden has evolved accordingly.
The lower east border looking south-west towards the main garden, with Thalic-trum ‘Splendide’, Geranium Rozanne, Agapanthus ‘Bressingham White’ and green Hydrangea paniculata ‘Limelight’.
Her first sighting of Craichlaw was in 1991, on the arm of Andrew Gladstone, the man she was about to marry, who had inherited the Victorian pile and its wooded estate some 14 years earlier. A teenager at the time, Mr Gladstone waited until he was 24 before moving into the house, which his grandmother had last occupied several decades earlier. ‘It was like stepping back into the 1950s,’ she recalls. ‘The house was still untouched, because Andrew had thrown himself into rescuing the woodland, which then was a shambolic mess of collapsed beech trees and laurels and completely overrun with Rhododendron ponticum.’
Grey granite walls completed a picture of rather dour austerity, leavened, perhaps, by the approach: the drive follows a tree-fringed loch, complete with its own island and stone-built curling huts. (The loch, created by Mr Gladstone’s great-great-grandfather to provide water to power a sawmill in the valley below, occasionally freezes in winter and is still used by the Kirkcowan Curling Club.) However, there was no garden, only empty lawn to the south of the house that incorporated formal yew hedging, planted by Mr Gladstone’s grandmother in the 1930s. Beyond that lay a ha-ha, meadows and a wooded horizon. However, Mrs Gladstone, who had met her future husband when studying Landscape Architecture at Edinburgh University and is possessed of extraordinary creative energy, was excited rather than deterred by the somewhat bleak surroundings. By 1994, married and pregnant with triplets (‘I found I had a great urge to be creative when pregnant’), she had drawn up a plan for the gardens and found contractors to execute the design.
The upper gravel terrace with clipped Carpinus topiary in Sophie’s Garden behind. The terrace has repeating mounds of Santolina chamaecyparissus with Stipa tennuissima, Pennisetum alopecuroides ‘Hameln’ and Nepeta ‘Walker’s Low’; Erigeron karvinskianus grows beneath.
The 16th-century Peel Tower, rebuilt when the house was remodelled in Scottish Baronial style by Mr Gladstone’s great-grandfather during the 1860s, proved an excellent spot from which to map out the new design. From this vantage point, she quickly conceived a broad gravel terrace with steps dropping to the yew-hedged lawn. This would be formally divided into four parts, crossed by wide grass paths, with places for sitting and eating and ‘quirky views’ to challenge any notion of formal sobriety.
Today, each quarter of the garden erupts with colour from late spring until autumn. It peaks from late July until mid August when the massed perennials are matched by a supporting cast of agapanthus, roses, clematis and hydrangeas. Three decades of critical appraisal, soil improvement and experimentation has delivered a gloriously immersive experience. The vibrant colours and sheer enthusiasm of the herbaceous planting is arresting in the boldness of its execution.
This continues to the east of the house, which once presented a particularly austere face to the world. Now, it is clothed in a gorgeous assembly of pink and purple clematis, golden hop and scarlet roses, fronted with an eruption of golden heleniums and tawny heliopsis. Below lie generously filled beds of perennials, repeating the colours and themes of the south borders — a dramatic spectacle invisibly held together by horizontal netting, stretched 2½ft above the soil.
The drama takes an unexpected turn on entering the cloistered and almost monotone stillness in the gravelled enclosure of Sophie’s Garden. (The design was conceived during an especially strong urge to create when pregnant with her fourth child.) This is populated with granite standing stones and perfectly topiarised cones of hornbeam, inspired by similar ones she had seen at Waterperry in Oxfordshire. Mrs Gladstone is currently considering adding skirts of Geranium Rozanne around the exposed trunks of the cones, to soften the almost shocking austerity. This, she acknowledges, would make it difficult to trim the topiary. However, her part-time gardener, Peter Smith, is equal to the challenge and the construction of a special platform for the purpose of pruning is envisaged.
Hydrangea arborescens ‘Annabelle’ outside Mary Gladstone’s pottery and small gallery. On the wall is the vigorous shrub rose Rosa moyesii, with single red flowers that produce large flagon-shaped hips. The topiary balls are Ilex crenata (Japanese holly).
Mr Smith, who has known the Craichlaw garden since working with the original contractors on a Youth Training Scheme, is also a dab hand at propagation and together they make a formidable team. Almost every plant in the garden has been raised at Craichlaw, either from cuttings, division or seed. Together too, they have conquered a fungal attack that threatened the yew hedge, by trimming it in the spring instead of giving it the traditional autumn cut and are working on ways to increase the single swag of Tropaeolum that garlands the hedge with scarlet — ‘it’s fiendishly difficult to grow from seed’.
The same curiosity and desire to experiment — matched with an unflinching critical eye — have brought much acclaim to the pieces Mrs Gladstone has created as a self-taught ceramicist. The twin disciplines of gardening and pottery are naturally complementary. Both begin with understanding the earthy medium from which plants and pots might one day emerge and both are hands-on. Restraint and repetition of texture, form and colour create the drama on display on the shelves of the small gallery next to her studio and alongside the wide gravelled terrace.
‘There was too much colour in the garden, especially yellow, to begin with,’ she reflects, ‘and miscanthus turned out to be too much of a solid blob blocking the view, whereas Stipa gigantea is much more transparent.’ Repetition of a limited palette of plants that do well in the Galloway climate provided the answer. Pennisetum alopecuroides works well, but has proved too much of a handful to keep under control and will also be removed. However, the Stipa tenuissima — although it self-seeds all over the place and is pulled out by the bucket-load — will stay.
The cotton lavender (Santolina chamaecyparissus) and Sedum spectabile remain superb late into the season. Erigeron karvinskianus needs management, too, but clearly enjoys itself on the sunny stone steps. None of these plants is particularly special or difficult to grow, but as Mrs Gladstone explains: ‘It’s the effect they produce together, and how they complement the house, that I’m after.’ Her success in this ambition is nothing short of magnificent.
Craichlaw, Dumfries & Galloway, is open by appointment through Scotland’s Gardens Scheme.
This feature originally appeared in the August 19, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.