Discover a garden that has moved with the times but remains true to its roots, where Elizabethan stonework is the mellow backdrop to flower borders bristling with colour.
Whet your appetite with these five highlights from the garden & estate:
Anyone for pudding?
© National Trust
This elegant pavilion is one of two ‘pudding houses' set into opposite corners of the East Court. Their sweet toothed nickname stems from Tudor and Stuart times, when parties would retire here from the Dining Room to savour their pudding in the splendour of the grandest part of the garden.
The pudding houses get their warm glow from local Ham stone, which was used to build Montacute. The stone is the perfect foil to the multicoloured summer flower borders. The pudding houses are often open to house exhibitions. You might even catch a lingering whiff of a long-devoured dessert.
Some like it hot
© National Trust
Bold is beautiful when it comes to the dazzling flower borders that run up the sides of the East Court. In summer, when they're at their peak, bright yellow acilleas vibrate against red and orange roses and royal purple clematis. Take a seat on one of the benches and saturate your eyes with colour.
The planting was designed by Phyllis Reiss, creator of nearby Tintinhull Garden, a woman who liked her colours strong. The pastel shades of an earlier planting scheme by Vita Sackville-West had proved too soft against the stone of the house and walls.
The hedge that's not so clean-cut
© Dylan Lumborg
This distinctive yew hedge's maze-like pattern was created not by any gardener but by the force of nature. Snow settled on it during a heavy storm in the winter of 1947, imprinting this curvaceous new look by the time it had melted weeks later.
The hedge has stayed this contorted shape ever since, and a sister hedge in the garden has been clipped to mirror it. You might recognise the hedge from its cameo role in the 1995 film 'Sense and Sensibility'.
The twist in the trunk
© National Trust
It was more than a twist of fate that brought the two sweet chestnuts on the Cedar Lawn to Montacute. They were specially chosen as seedlings for the promising twist of the bark on their trunks, and they've lived up to their potential.
The trees were planted in the 1850s by Ellen Phelips, who married into the family and brought her trusty gardener Pridham with her. Together, they re-designed the garden. Their handy work also includes the avenues of clipped Irish yews that stand guard around the garden and the sweeping West Drive.
Discover the estate
© Carl Bjork
From imposing oak and lime avenues to rare butterflies, woodpeckers and deer, there's lots to tempt you out of the garden and into the estate. Most of its 300 acres are open for you to explore. If that sounds a little daunting, we have three walks leaflets to help you discover more about its history, wildlife and landscape.
The leaflets are available from reception and each walk takes 45min to 1hr. One will lead you up St Michael's Hill, the pointed hill ('mons acutus' in Latin) from which Montacute takes its name, to a folly on the top built in 1760.
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