Discover Aldourie Castle on the shores of Loch Ness | plus four top plants from the garden

My name is Elliot Forsyth and I'm the head gardener here at Aldowrie Castle, a 7.5 acre Tom Stewart Smith garden set in a 500 acre estate in the lovely banks of Loch Ness. The layout of the garden consists of three distinct areas. Here we're in the round the castle area where we've got late season naturalistic planting and also a terrace area and it's quite formal I think with with the topiary here and the bed layout but that's contrasted with some really informal late season naturalistic planting from Tom. We also have like the arboretum which is a joining point between this garden here and also the walled garden. The walled garden itself is our productive centre of the garden where we have vegetables and cut flowers but it's also surrounded by generous naturalistic planting. In the wider estate we have extensive extensive wildflower meadows that we're sowing which envelop around the castle and also we have native woodland crisscrossed by lots of paths that often lead down to the loch and I think that's great because it allows people to you know they can they can stay close to the castle and have a sort of a more horticultural experience or else they can they can wander through these paths and lose themselves in the woods. So there really is something for everyone. This perennial is called Veronicastrum virginicum, a lavendeltrum and it's an excellent plant for for providing good form and shape in your herbaceous borders. The leaves are good right away to the base and it's got these these lovely lavender flowers. It's also the seed heads hold up well in the winter as well so it's definitely a plant that's performing over a long period of time. One of my favourites. This is Botonica officinalis hummelo. It's a cultivar that was selected by Pete Oudolf and together with Salvia nemorosa it provides like a good upright spike low upright spike in a naturalistic border. I think forms like that are really important because they contrast with the more mounding forms of things like geraniums and asters and other mounding forms which is important just just to give your border a bit of shape. It's a grass from Japan and it's called Hikonicola macra. It's a really hard working plant for your gardens. It's ideal on the corners of beds. It's very good for that and also it's great as a sort of textural foil for other plants so they can contrast off them for instance like round leaves. It also has really good sort of yellowy autumn colour so all in all it's another really hard working plant. Here we have an excellent plant Helenia motternali norheim beauty. Tom uses it here at the castle garden as a primary rhythm maker bouncing it through the planting and it just brings just brings a bit of heat to the planting. It's an excellent plant great with grasses the buff tones of grasses and also another good aspect about it is that that in the winter that that ball seed head just looks just looks terrific and it's very readable looks great with again with agreement with the linear leaves of grasses. It's an excellent plant.