Inverewe Garden

Himalayan rhododendrons, Tasmanian tree ferns and South African lilies grow on a headland at fifty-seven degrees north in the Scottish Highlands — a horticultural impossibility that has thrived since 1862. Inverewe exists because one man decided a barren, wind-scoured promontory could be made to bloom.

Inverewe Garden was created by Osgood Mackenzie, who inherited a bare, rocky headland and spent forty years importing soil by horse and creel, planting shelterbelts against the salt wind and introducing species from every continent except Antarctica. The North Atlantic Drift keeps frosts rare enough for plants from the Himalayas, Tasmania, Chile and South Africa to flourish a thousand miles north of their range — visiting botanists still express disbelief in the walled garden. Scotland's National Trust maintains it now as a working demonstration of what determination and microclimate can do together, with Loch Ewe glittering through the tree ferns and the bare Wester Ross hills across the water showing exactly what the headland would otherwise be.