How Howick Hall is helping to ensure vital tree species have a future

A passion for the outdoors is in Charlie’s blood. His father was a keen naturalist, and his mother, Lady Mary Howick (who inherited the family estate in 1963), was a committed gardener in the style of William Robinson, the great Victorian champion of wild gardening. When his father died in 1973, he inherited Howick Hall aged 35.

A decade later, he left his career at Barings Bank, and turned his full attention to Howick’s needs. ‘The main house burnt down in 1925 and my grandfather had to rebuild it with insurance money,’ he says. ‘We don’t have a great art collection – no lovely furniture – so we had to do something different. So the idea of planting an arboretum emerged.’

Charlie makes this sound like a hard-headed business decision, and his daughter Alice Ward-Thomas confirms that when he inherited the estate, he knew little about trees. ‘Mum’s great cry when he got married was that he hardly knew the difference between an ash and an oak.’ But she recalls visiting The Savill Garden in Windsor with him aged about nine, holding a Collins Tree Guide. ‘We’d go through the identifying keys together. He learned all the Latin terms for the shapes of the leaves. When Dad gets absorbed, he gets very absorbed.’

Howick Hall's grand exterior.

Andrew Maybury

The learning process sparked something in Charlie, but the concept of collecting wild-origin seed was a new one. He contacted Charles Erskine, then in charge of the arboretum at Kew Gardens, who told him what to do. Soon, he and an American colleague were collecting seed on the east coast of the US, arriving home with around 180 species. ‘The whole thing was great fun,’ he says. The next year, they travelled to the west coast and collected another 250 varieties, also picking up an American sponsor who funded forthcoming trips to China. Any surplus seed was given to the Royal Botanic Gardens, establishing links in the same way that plant hunters in the 18th and 19th centuries did. ‘It’s all boys swapping stamps,’ says Charlie, but a former curator at Kew said that no-one made field notes as meticulous as his. His ongoing relationships with Royal Botanic Gardens such as Edinburgh and Kew show how highly he is respected.

A month-long trip to Japan, where Charlie collected a further 450 species, was followed by nine trips to China, where he earned his spurs. ‘Inland, the roads were appalling, and the traffic bad; 50 miles could often take the entire day,’ he remembers. Despite the presence of Chinese minders, they returned with more than 400 species.

The textured bark of a Betula utilis tree, one of nearly 2,000 wild species at Howick Hall.

Andrew Maybury

The next learning curve was germinating the seed. In a small greenhouse on the estate, Charlie’s then head gardener, Robert Jamieson (who was with him for over 40 years), would propagate it. ‘We followed advice in the books from the experts; sometimes it worked, and sometimes we did exactly the opposite, and that worked too.’

Charlie now thinks they were lucky to hit a 25-year period when geopolitics were less turbulent than today.  In countries like China, seed collection is now heavily regulated. What he also couldn’t have predicted was the importance the changing climate would have on the work done at Howick. Northumberland was climatically a borderline region for growing many species of trees and shrubs, but is now something of an arboreal ark. Species that have become harder to grow in the south of the UK due to hot, dry summers are thriving in Northumberland.

Howick Hall's arboretum has two parts - the West Arboretum and the East Arboretum. The latter, shown here, is larger and hillier.

Andrew Maybury

Charlie can look at a tree he grew from seed 30 years ago and travel straight back to the mountainside where he collected it. He now collects seed from the mature trees in his arboretum each autumn, his dining-room table given over to plates full of wondrously shaped specimens. Thus the whole cycle starts again. He visits the arboretum each day, often with his new head gardener Marcus Wilson, with whom he shares his knowledge; Latin names are their lingua franca. The arboretum is now in the hands of a charitable trust, with Alice helping to plan its future. ‘Marcus and I need to clean the dirt from under Dad’s fingernails, where all the information is, and learn it,’ she says. ‘I’ve learned a lot this year, but sometimes I get cold sweats about how much there is still to discover.’

Charlie, meanwhile, works each day among the trees, moving with the physical ease of a man 30 years younger. His summary of his life’s work? ‘Not bad’.

Howick Hall Gardens: howickhallgardens.com