How an apparently impossible subject on the north west coast of Scotland was made to produce good trees, shrubs, fruit and flowers

Title of a lecture delivered by Osgood Mackenzie in 1908

I don’t make a habit of peering over garden walls, but the wall was partly demolished, the house abandoned, and I’d glimpsed what looked like a large cultivated shrub amidst a wilderness of weeds. It was festooned with waxy scarlet flowers or fruit, I couldn’t tell which, shaped like teardrops suspended on long slender stems. This was in Kinsale in West Cork, about 25 years ago, and I was on holiday with my parents. We were just taking an evening stroll after supper and collectively fell in love with this plant and determined to find out what it was. This was long before plant identifier apps and it took a little while, on returning from the trip, to locate the mystery plant in the RHS Gardeners’ Encyclopedia of Plants & Flowers. I forget where, but I tracked down the plant and bought it for my mother’s birthday that year. It grew in their tiny courtyard garden in Petersfield for many years until the house was sold in 2013.

And the name of the shrub which so caught my imagination? Crinodendron hookerianum or Chile lantern tree. It is named for William Jackson Hooker*, who was appointed the first full-time director of Kew Gardens in 1841, and studied many plants from Chile. I believe that ‘crinodendron’ means lily tree. A specimen grows in a side border of the woodland garden at Kew near the boundary wall with Kew Road and always reminds me of my mother and that warm evening in Ireland.

I was thrilled last week to find a superb specimen of C. hookerianum growing by the front door of the garden lodge, which was to be our home for three nights while we explored Inverewe gardens in the north west of Scotland. This superb National Trust for Scotland garden’s south-facing location on Loch Ewe means it benefits, like the gardens of south west Ireland, from the warming influence of of the Gulf Stream. In the 1860s, the maker of the garden, Osgood Mackenzie, planted a shelter belt of Scots pines around the peninsula on which Inverewe stands, to maximise the unique climate in his garden to grow species which wouldn’t be expected to survive, let alone thrive, in a place on the same latitude as Hudson’s Bay. The garden lodge shrub was so high and wide it almost hid the front door of the house.

During the two days I was at Inverewe I tried to walk as many of the paths through the wooded areas of the peninsula on which the garden is located as I could, admiring the fabulous collection of plants favouring the peaty, acidic soil. Amongst the Rhododendrons and Azaleas, I found several towering Crinodendrons, some at least four metres high. On the last evening, I walked down to an exquisite little cove, Camas Glas, to see the sun setting over Lough Ewe, and as I walked back came across an exquisite pink flowered cultivar, C. hookerianum Ada Hoffman. My mother died 11 years ago last week and it seemed very fitting that my visit to a garden which I know she would have loved discovering should be bookended by this plant which she took such pleasure in.

Reading more on my return home from the garden, I find it is not a coincidence that Inverewe and Chile lie on the west coasts of their respective land masses. As I explain later in this post, there is there some similarity in climate between the north west coast of Scotland and the temperate regions of Chile. Even during my short visit to Inverewe I spotted several other plants hailing from Chile. I should mention here that almost every plant I encountered was clearly labelled with a Kew style black label citing its botanical name and region of origin.

These are some of the other Chilean plants I found during my two day exploration of the plant lover’s paradise that is Inverewe:

Senecio candicans: Known in the horticultural trade as Angel Wings, S. candicans is often sold for summer bedding as it makes a striking statement plant in a container, its velvety pearl-grey leaves a foil for cerise pink pelargoniums or burgundy coloured dahlias. But at Inverewe itspreads several feet across a gritty bed in the Rock Garden. The terraced Rock Garden is partly constructed from stone salvaged from the grand mansion built by Osgood Mackenzie’s mother Mary in the 1860s, which burnt down in 1914, to be replaced in the 1920s by the art deco style Inverewe House built by Mackenzie’s daughter Mairi and her second husband Ronald Harwood. The low-key but very evocative interpretation installed in the ground floor rooms by the National Trust for Scotland brings the house and Mairi’s lifestyle vividly alive.

Araucaria araucana: more commonly called the monkey puzzle tree. This uniquely formed coniferous tree has of course become a fairly common sight in suburban front gardens. At Inverewe young specimens have been planted on the cliff edges below the High Viewpoint overlooking Loch Ewe, their distinctive spiky limbs visible in the centre of this image. I’m always intrigued by the story of its ‘collection’ by naval doctor Archibald Menzies who accompanied George Vancouver on the voyage to map the west coast of the Americas (1790 – 1795). Invited to supper by a local dignitary who served a dessert made from the tree’s pine-nuts, Menzies is said to have popped a few seeds into his pocket which he sowed on the return voyage to London, delivering the germinated plants to Kew Gardens.

Vancouver’s name appears in the name of another plant I saw in Inverewe’s damp woodland areas: Vancouveria hexandra or duckfoot.

Jovellana violaceae, is native to Chile, its dainty mauve round bell-shaped flowers earning it the common name violet teacup flower. I haven’t come across this before and saw it growing in several places across the garden, where it spreads over rocks in sunny clearings in the woodland areas. A low-growing shrub, I read that it is vulnerable to below zero temperatures, and would need protection if grown in gardens without Inverewe’s benign climate.

Embrothrium coccineum or Chilean Firetree. Reading about the native habitat of this spectacular shrub is a fascinating geography lesson. It is endemic to a narrow strip of land along the coasts of Chile and Argentina called the Valdivian temperate rain forest, whose climate is influenced by the prevailing winds, the ‘westerlies’, which carry warm, equatorial waters and winds to the western coasts of South America. The flower heads of this evergreen shrub consist of tubular scarlet petals narrowing to slender ‘stems’ held together in a loose clusters. The specimen I came across was several metres high.

I also happened upon another plant connected to William Jackson Hooker: Ourisia macrophylla, the mountain foxglove. A woodland under-storey plant, it was described by Hooker in 1843, having been collected on Mt Egmont in New Zealand and the specimen brought to Kew. An evergreen perennial which favours shade and moist peaty soil, it was growing amongst tree roots lining a path leading to the jetty at the tip of the Inverewe Garden peninsula.

A random fact I picked up when researching this post, is that Sir William Jackson Hooker rented a house called Brick Farm in Kew, renaming it West Hall. Feeling an urge to peer over a garden wall again, on Sunday afternoon I wandered down what is now very much a suburban street to see what, if anything, remains of the house where Hooker and his family lived, a few minutes walk from Kew Green and the gardens he curated. And there it stands, a few metres from the South Circular Road, a whitewashed double-fronted house behind a very high wall almost entirely surrounded by mature trees and shrubs. How many of them date from Hooker’s time, I don’t know, and the high wall prevented my seeing if they included a Crinodendron. But I wouldn’t have made a detour to find one of the oldest houses in Kew had it not been for the magical garden at Inverewe.

Kew, Surrey 21 May 2025