Centenary Garden, Newhailes

Centenary Garden, Newhailes: a design for the next 100 years

Harris Bugg Studio has been appointed by the National Trust for Scotland to design the Centenary Garden at Newhailes House and Gardens in Musselburgh – a landmark commission marking the Trust’s 100th anniversary in 2031.

Newhailes is one of Scotland’s most significant historic properties, a Palladian villa set within a designed landscape on the edge of the shoreline town of Musselburgh. The Centenary Garden will occupy the walled enclosure of the former Flower Garden, a three-acre site with views from the house across treetops and stone walls to Arthur’s Seat beyond.

The design is influenced by what is already there. Before work began,  extensive time was spent at Newhailes, reading the estate carefully: its history, its people, its materials and its setting. The Flower Garden was once the most ornamental part of the estate, cherished by Miss Christian Dalrymple, who inherited Newhailes in 1792. A curious and progressive woman of the Scottish Enlightenment, she commissioned garden designer John Hay to create a new garden in the early nineteenth century. Hay’s drawings, preserved in the archives, are sinuous and elegant, formed around paisley motifs. Though the garden was never realised, those drawings are one thread among many that has shaped the design.

Hay’s forms are reinterpreted and layered with the shell shapes of Musselburgh’s shoreline, merging within the shelter of the historic walls to create a series of planted islands across the three-acre site. Their organic geometry is legible from the house above and immersive at ground level. Rich, resilient planting will support pollinators and wildlife, while trial beds will explore how gardens can adapt to a changing climate.  Stone from the collapsed tea house, old bricks and reclaimed tiles are being given new purpose: salvaged stone will become curving benches, crushed bricks and tiles part of the planting medium.

Press

Gardens Illustrated: The Historic Scottish Garden Getting A Centenary Makeover – Using 200-Year-Old Designs