Owned by National trust but leased to Cheshire East Council which is responsible for the entire financial and operational management of the site. Strong desire to monetize estate. Many excellent features but a bit of a mish-mash. The Japanese Garden is to the west of the southern end of the Broad Walk and is considered to be the finest Japanese garden in the United Kingdom.
Tatton Park was owned by the Egerton family from 1598 to 1958, when it passed to the National trust, and in that time the estate followed the ups and downs family’s fortunes. Each generation though sort to add to the garden’s design as influenced by the tastes of the time. This has led to a landscaped parkland with a maze, formal shrub beds, an orangery, an Italianate garden and a Japanese garden all living cheek by jowl. While this means the garden does not represent a great example of any genre, the Japanese garden being a worthy exception, it does give a good view of the different influences on garden tastes over the last half millennia.
Many of these individual components have been well conceived; the Japanese garden which dates from the second decade of the 20th century is possible the finest example of the style in England. Unfortunately, successive generations have struggled to integrate their additions into what went before giving a rather dis-joined feel to the overall garden. This is thought common to many gardens with a long history and comes more from a confidence to be bold and to take the garden forward than any poor taste.
The problem that this garden does now have is that though owned by the National Trust it is managed and financed by the local authority. All local government struggles to balance necessary public expenditure with its income and so Cheshire East Council has very limited scope for investing in the gardens. It does though need to make any asset such as Tatton Park to be at the very least self-financing and ideal contributing to the council’s finances. It also needs to try and make the park as relevant as possible to as wide a range of people as it can, this inevitably leads to conflicts with the needs to preserve a historic garden. In the main, Cheshire East Council does a good job of balancing these contrasting demands but in places the strain shows.
