Before spring visitors even step through the gates of Borde Hill in West Sussex, they are greeted by the soaring branches of magnolias; their blooms standing out like lanterns against a clear blue sky.
“You can literally be enveloped by magnolias here,” says Harry Baldwin, Borde Hill’s head of horticulture. “We surprise visitors with an incredible amount of diversity in terms of their flowers, leaves, scent and habit.”
Colonel Stephenson Robert Clarke bought Borde Hill House in 1893 with 610 acres of land, and began his collection of ‘new and uncommon trees’ ten years
