Lulah Ellender takes in the grounds of Herstmonceux Castle, then ‘sees’ them.

I’ve learned that sometimes the best way to experience a garden is to go unprepared. To let the place work on you until you’ve found a sense of arrival and presence. This is how I approached my visit to Herstmonceux Castle. I had been years ago and had only a vague memory of one of my children having a howling tantrum there. Expecting the usual solid stone of our Sussex Norman castles, I was surprised to see the building was made of red brick. The front is impressive, with Disney-worthy undulating turrets, crenelations, and a wide soupy moat dotted with glossy lily pads. Crossing the bridge, you pass through a wisteria-covered quad and through to the gardens.

Herstmonceux is all about the external – from the formal gardens to wildflower meadows and ponds edged by 400-year-old woodlands. This is largely because the castle is a working campus for Bader College, part of Canada’s Queen’s University. Instead of seeking tapestried bedchambers and cavernous dining halls, visitors come for the gardens and events, as well as to explore the Observatory Science Centre that crouches near the driveway entrance. The original building was commissioned as a fortified manor in 1441 by Sir Roger Fiennes but was demolished in the late 18th century, remaining a ruin until Colonel Claude Lowther began restoring the castle in 1913. The work was completed in 1933 by Sir Paul Latham, and in 1946 the estate was sold to the Admiralty, who wanted to relocate the Greenwich Observatory away from London’s air and light pollution. In the 1980s the Observatory moved again, and the estate was gifted to Queen’s University by a wealthy alumnus, Alfred Bader.

The gardens reflect this variegated backstory, beginning with the main event: the Elizabethan Garden. Despite the name, this large walled garden owes more to the Arts and Crafts style: deep herbaceous borders, rambling roses, dogwoods, abundance. On the day I visit the borders are filled with euphorbia, tulips and daffodils, all dusted with the pink-white leaves dropped by the magnolia trees that take centre stage in the spring. It’s worth pausing here to consider the magnolia.

Spectacular because of their brevity, magnolia trees mark time even as they come into flower, the leaves quickly browning at the edges. The species dates back 95 million years to a time before bees, when plants were pollinated by beetle-like insects. Lacking the dainty dexterity of a honeybee, the clumsy truffling of these prehistoric insects required plants to be tough – hence the magnolia’s sturdy structure. The trees are named after the 17th-century botanist, Pierre Magnol, who dedicated his life’s work to classifying and organising plants. The saucer magnolias at Herstmonceux aren’t native to Britain but were hybridised from East Asian or North American parent species in France in the 19th century.

So, we have an ‘Elizabethan’ garden, constructed along 1930s design principles, with trees that were bred by a Frenchman and originated far away, back in the Cretaceous era. How does this knowledge complicate what we see? We enter a garden, take in the scene, then recalibrate our view to see individual plants, colours, proportions and textures. Our view is composed through angles in walls, gaps, borders, reflections in water. Then we learn more, calibrating the history of the place through its layered stories that change the image we’re observing. If, as John Berger argued, ‘seeing’ establishes our place in the world before language explains it, visiting a garden with such a rich past means observing a living landscape first with the senses and then with understanding.

These gardens conjure another calibration as you pass into the Sundial and Rose Garden. A large metal sundial, erected in 1975, turns this formal space into a site of measurement, marking time in increments of shadow. Amidst the forget-me-nots and roses is a bust of the first Astronomer Royal, John Flamsteed, who made over 50,000 observations of the moon and stars to create a more accurate map of the sky. These early astronomers turned their precision instruments to classify the heavens, finding points in the darkness that would guide the empire’s ships. For a time, Herstmonceux provided more recent scientists with the darkness they needed to continue this work. Now you can join stargazing events, an Astronomy Festival, or the new ‘Lunar Experience’ launching this summer. Instead of calibrating our ‘seeing’ to view the landscape, the Observatory invites us to map our eyes skyward.

This spirit of exploration and inquiry extends across the grounds, from the children’s games set out on the lawns, to the Magic and Apothecary Gardens. Come to observe the gardens by day, and the stars by night. Stay until your way of seeing has changed.

Lulah Ellender is the author of the memoirs Elizabeth’s Lists (Granta 2018) and Grounding: Finding Home in a Garden (Granta 2022)