High Beeches Woodland and Water Garden

About

High Beeches Woodland and Water Garden is a beautiful, tranquil and historic garden of some 27 acres. It was begun more than 100 years ago and is full of rare and important plants and trees. High Beeches Gardens is situated just outside Handcross, in the heart of mid-Sussex, close to the A/M23 and within easy access of London, the South and South East.

The garden offers seasonal interest, with glorious spring and early summer colour and fragrance including magnolias, camellias, bluebells, azaleas and rhododendrons. High Beeches Gardens has been recommended in the RHS Rhododendrons, Camellias and Magnolias Group Handbook as the best garden in the UK in which to see Rhododendrons growing. David Millais, a member of the RHS Rhododendrons, Camellias and Magnolias Committee and owner of Millais Nurseries is a recognized authority on the plants. He wrote "go to High Beeches Gardens in Sussex to see (Rhododendrons) plants on a good spacing, where they have room to develop and show their true characteristics." In June the wildflower meadow is at its peak. The Willow Gentians are a spectacular blue in August and High Beeches has magnificent and sumptuous autumn colour.

High Beeches is home to a number of champion trees, and it is the only UK site where the magnificent blue Willow Gentian is naturalised. High Beeches has the National Collection of Stewartia and also the finest natural acid wildflower meadow in Sussex with more than 200 varieties of wild flowers as recorded by the Botanical Society of the British Isles. High Beeches is one of the top gardens in the country for autumn colour and has the best autumn colour in Sussex

The Bray/Boscawen gardening dynasty has cared for the garden for fifty years. Their great passion is the 'species' forms of plants - the original, wild forms from around the world. The garden is fully catalogued and contains thousands of specimens including numbered plants collected by famous plant hunters such as Ernest Wilson.