Seeds from California
Oyoyoy / CC BY-SA 3.0
Some of the tallest trees at Crathes carry a North American story that began in nineteenth-century California.
Crathes Castle was home to generations of the Burnett family. In the mid-nineteenth century Robert Burnett, a son of the 10th Baronet of Leys, was sheep-ranching in California in the years after the Gold Rush. He sent American conifer seeds back to Deeside at a time when plant collecting was changing Scottish gardens and estates. Those introductions took root and became part of the landscape around the castle. The North American connection is still growing here.
The sixteenth-century tower house, formal garden and tall conifers now sit together so naturally that their different origins are easy to miss. The trees make the estate a record of movement as well as design.
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