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Dalemain's garden won the Historic Houses Association and Christie's Garden of the Year Award in 2013 — recognition of a genuine plantsman's garden, tended by one family for generations, rather than a set piece designed and left to maintain itself.
The Rose Walk holds over two hundred varieties, and elsewhere in the garden a timeline of apple trees traces the history of the fruit through successive plantings — a garden feature that works less like a display and more like a living archive. Carpets of snowdrops and aconites open the gardening year in earliest spring, followed by daffodils across the wider grounds.
Dalemain holds its own named cultivar of the Himalayan blue poppy, Meconopsis grandis 'Dalemain' — a demanding plant that needs cool, moist, humus-rich conditions to thrive, and one that most English gardens simply can't grow well. That Dalemain can, and has done well enough to have a variety named for the house, says something about the particular conditions of this stretch of the Eden valley.
Alongside the horticulture, Dalemain keeps a genuinely playful streak: a box topiary dragon, a sculpture nicknamed the "sleeping earth giant," and a door in the formal garden's wall that opens straight into Lob's Wood, a leafy stand of beech trees that feels like a different garden entirely. It's a combination that makes Dalemain one of the more unexpectedly fun gardens on this list, alongside its more serious horticultural credentials.
Dalemain’s gardens can be included in a bespoke gardens and heritage day near Ullswater.