Description of the attraction
Wakehurst Place is a manor house, old mansion from the 16th century and gardens, mostly 20th century, located near the town of Ardingley in West Sussex. The gardens are part of the Royal Botanic Gardens and cover an area of two square kilometers. Basically, the gardens were created by Gerald Loder, the first Baron Wakehurst, who bought the estate in 1903 and devoted 33 years to planning, growing and maintaining the garden. Its successor was Sir Henry Price, who in 1963 bequeathed the gardens to the state, and in 1965 the gardens came under the tutelage of the Royal Botanic Gardens. Wakehurst Place is now the property of the UK National Trust.
Wakehurst Place is home to the UK's largest Christmas tree, a 35-meter-tall giant sequoia tree with 1,800 lights on Christmas Eve.
There is a national collection of various types of birches, beeches, St. John's wort and skimmy. Also in Wakehurst Place is the Millennium Seed Bank - a repository of seeds for various plant species. The seeds are dried, packed in glass containers and stored in an underground storage at a temperature of -20 degrees Celsius. Experts say that such seeds will be suitable for cultivation for many years, which will restore plants that have disappeared from the face of the earth. The Seed Bank was founded in 2000, which is why it is called the Millennium Seed Bank. This is an international project involving a wide variety of countries. Now the storage has collected several million seeds of 24,000 plant species (10% of all plants on earth).
