This 98 acre shrub garden, overlooking Mount's Bay, climbs gently uphill for a third of a mile following a little stream.

Trengwainton faces due south and has a wonderfully mild climate, rarely experiencing hard frosts.

As a result tender and half-hardy trees, shrubs and other plants have been established here that cannot be grown in the open anywhere else in England.

Trengwainton is largely a 20th century creation although there has been a house here at least since the 16th century. Lieutenant Colonel Sir Edward Bolitho, whose family came here in 1857, began work on the garden after he inherited the rambling Victorian house in 1925.

The framework of the garden dates back to the early 19th century when Rose Price, the son of a wealthy West Indian sugar planter, planted the tall beeches and oaks that line the stream and shelter the house.

Without these trees Trengwainton would suffer the full force of the westerly gales.

Price also used much of his income from the Jamaican plantations to create the unusual walled garden at the foot of the drive. He used brick, a warmer but more expensive material than the local granite, to build a series of compartments.

The dividing walls between each separate garden have a steeply sloped bed of banked-up soil on their western side. This is a rare survival of a practice that was common in the late 18th and early 19th centuries and the south- and west-facing slopes receive the full benefit of the sun. Here early crops of vegetables are produced and tender plants cultivated.