Gardens, Grand and Glorious : In Scotland, a historic masterpiece designed to impress the neighbors

The approach to this landmark Scottish garden, a mile-long driveway lined with tall beech trees, looks more like a country road than a private preserve. We passed a pond where geese were taxiing for takeoff. A gardener scythed grass under the trees. A light rain started to fall, but then we’d been rained on all over Scotland. We were used to it.

My husband, Ed Barton, and I were about midpoint in our British loop: north from London to the Lake District, all around the western and northern edges of Scotland, and now, heading south, in Perthshire, a county celebrated as the gateway to the Highlands, awash in whiskey distilleries and Scottish history. It is also home to Scotland’s largest formal garden--Drummond Castle Gardens, about 12 acres of Renaissance-style extravagance--soon to make an appearance in the film “Rob Roy,” which opens this week, starring Liam Neeson and Jessica Lange.

After two weeks of rain, astonishingly bad food and some grim little B&Bs;, after being dazzled by nature in all its rugged splendor--mountains, rocks, lochs, sheep, heather, ocean, rain, more heather, more sheep--we were ready for some refined splendor.

At the end of the long Drummond driveway, the first building we saw was the keep, first constructed about 1490, although only a small part of the original remains. A keep is not necessarily a castle; in the old days, when enemy clans were apt to show up at one’s portcullis unannounced and ready to rumble, the keep was the safest, strongest part of a castle, more fort than living quarters. Drummond’s keep, separate from the castle itself, is a kind of stone skyscraper, dark and brooding. After we parked in the gravel lot outside the castle walls and passed through the keep’s archway, we saw the castle--also gray stone but not quite so forbidding. Neither keep nor castle is open to the public.

A short walk toward the castle along a gravel path, then a right turn, and there it was.

Beware: When visiting Drummond, the first sight of the garden may make your jaw drop and your heart skip one or two beats. Even on an overcast day in late September of last year, long after the pansies had packed it in, the view was spectacular. Like some royal European gardens, Drummond delivers a succinct power message: Eat your hearts out, peasants!

And so we did. The gravel walkway leads to a massive stone staircase. From the top of the stairs, looking more or less south, the grounds seem to fall away--far away--from one’s feet, a giant green patchwork of shrubbery, hedges, mazes and walkways. Looking straight out and down, we saw the giant obelisk sundial, its base surrounded by black and white pebbles laid in a wave pattern, like those on the Drummond family coat of arms.

The garden is a web of parterres, meaning segments or “outdoor rooms,” many quite simple, with only lawn, statue and border shrubbery, others dotted with trees or fountains. Triangular parterres radiating from the sundial are filled with short, clipped hedges, making them look like Lilliputian mazes. Everywhere there are examples of topiary, the technique that guarantees continuous employment for gardeners. Shrubs large and small are clipped into cylinders, squares, ovals, exclamation points, globes and one oddly flat-topped cylinder, reminiscent of a popular haircut.

The garden and castle are separate worlds, joined only by a daunting stone staircase, arranged in two tiers, each with steps leading left and right. The “landing” between the sets of stairs is like a grassy road. As we started our long journey down the right side, I was comforted by the thought that I didn’t have to navigate the steps in a farthingale, satin pumps and multiple petticoats, as many an early Drummond lass surely did.

Once at the bottom of the stairs, we made straight for the sundial, constructed in 1630 by King Charles I’s master mason, John Mylne III. I squinted, trying to make out the inscriptions, feeling very small next to its 12-foot-or-so height. Although obelisk sundials weren’t unique in 17th-Century Scotland, this one must have knocked their kilts off. Its spire rises from a flattened globe perched on a slender base. Protruding from the globe, metal points, called gnomons, show the time in different capitals of the world, like all those modern airport clocks compressed into one glorious 17th-Century technological marvel.

Then, bewilderment. Where to next? Take it parterre by parterre, west to east? Do a spiral, from the sundial out? Wander aimlessly?

Aimless won. We tramped along little box hedges, past white flowering borders and lavender edgings, around Japanese maples and under beech trees (nothing is labeled, so there were many plants I couldn’t identify), craning our necks at tall marble gods, goddesses and worldly heroes. The plants and statues are handsome but not particularly special; Drummond’s appeal is its overall magnificence.

It is a remarkably un-British garden, a type characterized for most of us by the exuberant plantings at Sissinghurstin Kent, or, on a grander scale, landscapes that elaborately mimic nature, like those at Stourhead and Blenheim Palace. Nor does Drummond have the intimacy and surprise of some Renaissance Italian gardens, which often reveal themselves one room at a time. Drummond conjures up nothing less than the rigidly formal 17th-Century gardens designed for the French nobility--a small-scale Versailles, but softened by asymmetry (trees planted here and there instead of in exact pairs) and the beautiful Scottish hillside beyond its walls.

Drummond’s mannerly appearance, we learned, is maintained by four gardeners year-round plus two or three “youngsters” in the summer “to keep on top of the grass,” said custodian Joe Buchanan. (Buchanan and his wife, Jane, live in the castle, which is owned by Lady Jane Willoughby, a Drummond descendant. No Drummonds live there.)

And it is just a garden. No cafe, no gift shop, no chatty docents. Visitors are discouraged from walking around or taking close-up pictures of the castle because it is a private residence.

Our wanderings took us to the ornate stone archway-gate directly opposite the castle. Just through and beyond the gate was a whole other garden: Steps lead down to terraced beds where ornamental plants are grown to be later transplanted into the garden. Several beds contained vegetables and herbs used in the castle’s kitchen. A long stone building was divided into rooms holding rakes, spades, forks and shovels, boots--and in one room, a few chairs faced a table spread with a deck of cards. Greenhouses along the garden’s stone wall shelter tender tropical plants, espaliered fruit trees and out-of-season flowers.

“The garden doesn’t have much color in spring,” Buchanan said. “Blooms in July mostly.”

Moviegoers won’t be seeing that flush of summer flowers in “Rob Roy” either. The film, directed by Michael Caton-Jones and with Liam Neeson as Rob Roy and Jessica Lange as his wife, Mary, was scheduled to shoot at the castle a few days after our visit, using the keep and garden as exterior sites. Drummond stands in for the castle of the Marquis of Montrose (John Hurt), Rob Roy’s arch enemy.

Rob Roy, whose real name was Robert Roy MacGregor, was a Scottish hero who was actually a cattle thief. Because of his clan’s incessant troublemaking (“bloodthirsty habits” is how one guidebook describes it), MacGregor’s lands were taken from him, and he turned to thievery. In Sir Walter Scott’s historical novel “Rob Roy,” the redheaded rebel, whose sympathies were with the poor, was immortalized as a kind of Robin Hood. MacGregor was imprisoned in London and later pardoned, dying peacefully in his bed near Loch Voil, west of Drummond.

In the early 1700s, when Rob Roy did much of his marauding, Drummond’s garden probably didn’t have anything like its present geometrical and botanical precision, although the magnificent sundial was already in place. By Rob Roy’s time, Drummond’s keep was more than 200 years old; it was built by John, the first Lord Drummond in the late 1400s, after Scotland’s James IV granted him the property. The Drummond family history is part Gothic thriller, part sensible land management. Legend has it that in 1502, Drummond enemies poisoned Margaret Drummond and her sisters in the castle to prevent Margaret from marrying James IV. But the family prospered anyway: The fourth Lord Drummond was made the first Earl of Perth in 1605; his brother John took over in 1612 and commissioned a Renaissance-style rectangular garden. Assorted conflicts ravaged the castle and the garden during Oliver Cromwell’s reign and the Jacobite uprising of 1745, the latter ending in disaster for the Scots at Culloden Moor. The Drummonds had fought the English for Bonnie Prince Charlie (Charles Edward Stuart), so their property was attainted--confiscated as punishment for rebellion--by the English victors in 1746. Thirty-nine years later, the castle was restored to a Drummond descendant.

What is generally considered to be the garden’s greatest glory was overseen by Peter Robert Burrell, Lord Willoughby de Eresby, who had married into the Drummond family. He hired English landscape designer Lewis Kennedy, who, along with architect-designer Sir Charles Barry, another Englishman, is credited with laying out the basic plantings and paths in the early 19th Century.

The garden evolved quickly into an impressive collection. Like many large Victorian landscapes, it capitalized on the discoveries of botanical explorers, many of them Scottish, and was soon crammed with plants from all over the world. In the Drummond souvenir booklet, photographs from 1857 show a garden dense with low, mounding plants and almost no lawn.

But two world wars brought neglect, and in the early 1950s, the garden was razed, every plant yanked up except for the old yew hedges at either end of the terracing, a few individual yews and the two copper beeches that Queen Victoria had planted to commemorate her 1842 visit. The present garden retains the bones of the Kennedy/Barry plan, but the greenery is less varied than in the past century.

Don’t worry. There is still plenty to admire. After an hour of poking about the acreage, we trudged back up those endless stairs, stopping a few times to catch our breath and admire the panorama. Drummond may not be the garden of a passionate collector or innovative designer, but its stately beauty is something to behold. Even in the rain. Even in the movies.

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GUIDEBOOK

Planting Yourself in Scotland

Getting there: From London’s Heathrow Airport, take the underground to Kings Cross Station, from which trains to Perth, Scotland, leave every two hours. A first-class, one-way ticket costs about $160, standard class $110, for the six-hour journey.

Several daily buses travel from Perth through Crieff past the castle entrance, but the bus schedules don’t always coincide with the opening times of the gardens. Better to get off in Crieff and ask the Tourist Information Centre, on High Street near James Square (tel. 0764-652-578 locally), to direct you to a local bus or call a taxi. Better yet, rent a car. The cheerful staff at Perth’s Tourist Information Centre (45 High St.; tel. 0738-638-353) can direct you. Take Route A85 west to A822 south.

Garden particulars: Drummond Castle Gardens (tel. 0764-681-257) is open April 1 through Oct. 31, daily from 2 to 6 p.m. (last entry at 5). Admission fee: about $4.50, adults, $2.25, children; free parking. Entrance on Route A822, about 2 1/2 miles south of Crieff.

For more information: British Tourist Authority, 551 5th Ave., Suite 701, New York, NY 10176; (800) 462-2748.