Mount Stewart is a stunning family home and one of the world’s top ten gardens. The gardens are spectacular, and universally renowned for their plant collections and the originality of their features.

When Edith, Lady Londonderry made Mount Stewart her home in 1921, she created something truly unique. So delighted with her new home, she wrote to her husband Charles, ‘this is the most divine house, why do we live anywhere else!’ Her interiors transcend time and taste where anything placed by her hand was always acceptable. The gardens at Mount Stewart will amaze you with their wealth of plants from all over the world. The flowering stretches all year round and whenever your visit, you will find beautiful and surprising plants to admire. There are over 70 acres of garden to explore with formal gardens packed with fanciful animal statues and beautiful plants, drawing from Irish and classical mythology. The woodland gardens are like a painting through which you can walk, stimulating all the senses and changing in the course of a day and the course of the seasons.

Sunk Gardens

The Sunk Garden west of the house was the second garden compartment Lady Londonderry embarked upon after the Italian Garden. Centered on the Little Dining Room or Breakfast Room and Lord Londonderry’s bedroom above, it and the Shamrock Garden beyond are the only part of Lady Londonderry’s design which relate directly with the ground floor of the house. The planting is based on a sketch in one of nine garden notebooks, dated 1922.

The Italian Garden

There is a richness to the Italian Garden unequalled elsewhere, in its architectural detail, its planting and a humorous allegory. Lady Londonderry was known as Circe, the sorceress goddess Odysseus’ sailors meet on the most westerly Isle the Greeks knew of. Circe turned half of Odysseus’ crew into pigs and their faces and that of Circe are depicted on the herms on the southern wall. The planting is derived from an article Lady Londonderry wrote for the RHS Journal in 1935.

The Spanish Garden

The arcades of Cypress designed by Lady Londonderry were inspired by an early 16th-century description written by a Venetian traveller who described how similar arcades were used by the Moors to line the water parterre of the Garden of the Generalife near Grenada. The colour palette comes from the blue/green hue of the Casita tiles and the salmon pink limestone of the decorative well head, which was bought by Lady Londonderry at the Chelsea Flower Show in 1926.

The Mairi Garden:

Lady Londonderry founded and directed the Women’s Legion, a voluntary organization which placed women into the work place during WWI and whose emblem was a stylized Tudor Rose. Lady Londonderry gave this emblem the Stewart family colours of blue and white. Today, the Mairi Garden has a succession of blue and white flowers. A bronze statue commemorates the birth of Lady Mairi in 1921, surrounded by bells and cockle shells based on the nursery rhyme.