Holker Hall's estate has never been sold. It passed from the Preston family, who bought the land after the Dissolution of the Monasteries, to the Lowthers by marriage, and then in 1756 to the Cavendish family — and the garden carries the marks of all three, plus at least two major redesigns since.
Close to the house, the garden divides into a sequence of distinct formal spaces: the Elliptical Garden, the Summer Garden — built on the site of former tennis courts, entered through a beech arch — and the Sunken Garden with its pair of summer houses. Each has its own character rather than reading as one continuous scheme, a sign of a garden that has been added to rather than designed once and left alone.
Thomas Mawson, one of the leading landscape architects of the Edwardian period, worked on Holker's gardens in 1901 and again in 1910, when he redesigned the formal garden and added a terrace wall. Mawson's work elsewhere includes some of the most significant Edwardian gardens in Britain, and his imprint at Holker is part of what gives the formal areas their confident, structured feel.
The garden's most recent addition dates from 2003–04: a cascade, a labyrinth and a sundial, designed by Kim Wilkie and Mark Lennox-Boyd. It's a useful reminder that Holker's garden isn't a fossilised historic set piece — it's still being actively shaped by the family who live there, in the same way it always has been.
Holker Hall’s gardens can be included in a bespoke gardens and heritage day.