A tremendous feat of Victorian engineering, the landscape of Stobo Japanese Water Garden in the Scottish Borders has endured for over a century, its sense of flow and zen-like peace prevailing
WORDS CLARE FOGGETT PHOTOGRAPHS RAY COX
When Agnete Samdahl and her husband Roland Bonney moved to Stobo in 2021, they’d been looking for a farm. They found the perfect place in Peeblesshire’s picturesque Tweed Valley, but as well as the acres of farmland they envisaged buying, they also took on one of the region’s best-known gardens: Stobo Japanese Water Garden. “A water garden wasn’t what we were intending to buy, but when we walked through it, the serenity of it was certainly a major factor in our decision. It just has such a calming influence,” says Agnete.
That there’s a Japanese water garden in the middle of this most Scottish countryside is down to Victorian cricketer Hylton Philipson, who owned Stobo Castle from 1905. The castle itself is now a hotel and spa, and Agnete and Roland live in the farmhouse. A keen gardener, Philipson was inspired by the gardens he saw in Japan, which he’d visited on the way home from a Test series in Australia in 1895. Using all the Victorian engineering ingenuity at his disposal, Philipson set about damming the burns that run across Stobo’s land. One dam formed a loch in the hills above Stobo, which was used to generate energy to power the castle, while a second dam created the lower loch. Hidden above the garden, it’s this second loch that feeds the dramatic cascading waterfall at the head of the garden, from where the water rushes along streams, around moss-covered rocks and under a series of Japanese bridges, all surrounded by plantings of now-mature trees.
On open days, the garden is entered at the foot of the slope, where a shelterbelt of conifers protects the tranquil scene inside from the worst of the wind. The path leads upwards, past a stone Japanese lantern and a trio of stepping stones that links two waterfalls, and over the first arched bridge. “The garden is 110 years old now and it’s pretty amazing the way it can handle itself, it’s so well established,” Agnete observes. “But obviously there’s a fair bit of work that we’ve been doing, too. Our first summer here was spent rebuilding bridges, and we’ve now done all but one of those. We’ve also extended the garden and built a few new paths so there��
