The Preservation vs Adaptation Dilemma: How Cornwall's Historic Gardens Can Survive Climate Change

There is a particular kind of responsibility that comes with caring for a historic garden. It is different from the responsibility of maintaining a well-kept private garden, or even a well-designed contemporary one. It is the responsibility of a custodian — someone charged not just with keeping plants alive and spaces beautiful, but with preserving something that belongs, in a meaningful sense, to more than just its current owners.

Cornwall has an extraordinary concentration of such gardens. Valley gardens developed over centuries, planted with species collected from across the world, shaped by the hands of generations of gardeners. Some have histories stretching back to the 1600s. Others were established during the great Victorian plant-hunting era and have barely changed in their fundamental character since. All of them are now facing a question that their original creators could not have anticipated: how do you preserve something when the climate in which it was created is changing beneath your feet?

This is, I believe, one of the most important and genuinely difficult questions in British horticulture right now. And it is one I have thought about deeply, both through my research for my RHS Master of Horticulture dissertation and through my day-to-day work as head gardener at the Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden in St Ives.

The nature of the conflict

At its heart, the preservation versus adaptation dilemma is a conflict between two legitimate duties. Preservation implies keeping faith with what exists — the plants, the structure, the atmosphere, the historical authenticity of a place. Adaptation implies responding to changing conditions — editing, replacing, diversifying, future-proofing. These two impulses are not always incompatible, but they can pull sharply in opposite directions, and the tension between them is real.

A garden manager who prioritises preservation above all else risks watching irreplaceable specimens slowly decline, pouring resources into plants that are increasingly ill-suited to the conditions, and ultimately losing far more than would have been lost through timely, thoughtful intervention. A garden manager who prioritises adaptation too aggressively risks stripping away the very qualities that give a garden its character and meaning — replacing the particular with the generic, the historic with the merely functional.

Neither extreme serves the garden well. What is needed is a more nuanced approach, and it begins with understanding clearly what it is that actually matters most about each individual place.

The Hepworth garden: a case study in authenticity

The Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden in St Ives sits at the most demanding end of the preservation spectrum. This is not simply a historic garden — it is an artwork in its own right, composed by one of the twentieth century's greatest sculptors, where the relationship between the planting, the sculptures, and the light was consciously and deliberately arranged.

Many of the plants in the garden were chosen and placed by Hepworth herself. Prunus 'Accolade', photographed in the garden in 1970, still flowers in the same spot today. Cinerarias (Pericallis x hybrida) create the soft drifts of colour that have characterised the space for decades and appear in historical photographs from Hepworth's own time. To remove or replace these plants carelessly would not simply be a horticultural decision — it would be an act with genuine cultural and artistic consequences.

And yet even here, the pressure of climate change is being felt. Recent dry summers have stressed the garden's mature trees — including a large Fagus sylvatica f. purpurea that has been losing leaves earlier than it should. The garden sits on a slope contained by a fifteen to twenty foot retaining wall, making it extremely free-draining. Eight mature trees in a third of an acre each consume enormous quantities of water during dry periods. The question of irrigation infrastructure has moved from theoretical to urgent.

The approach I advocate for the Hepworth garden — and for any garden with similarly strong requirements for historical authenticity — is to direct maximum resources towards keeping signature species performing for as long as is feasible, while beginning, carefully and gradually, to prepare for the longer term. That means implementing rainwater harvesting from roofs, installing drip or seep hose irrigation rather than sprinklers which can spread fungal disease, and building soil water-holding capacity through the addition of organic matter. These are not adaptations that change the character of the garden. They are investments in its preservation.

The ecological and wildlife gardening principles I apply across my work are also relevant here — building biodiversity and resilience into the planting, so that the garden as a whole system is more robust, even as individual species face pressure.

The historic valley garden: structure over specimens

Move along the spectrum to Cornwall's more loosely historic valley gardens — those with significant history but without the specific requirement to preserve the work of a named individual — and the balance shifts somewhat. Here, what matters most is not the preservation of particular specimens but the preservation of structure, character, and atmosphere.

In conversations with the head gardener of one such garden for my dissertation research, the concern expressed was not so much about individual plants as about the garden's fundamental spatial qualities — the sense of enclosure, the layered woodland canopy, the scale and rhythm of the planting. These are qualities that take generations to establish and cannot simply be replanted in a season. A mature woodland garden, as one head gardener described it, offers limited space for transitioning — there is simply not the room to introduce new species while existing ones are still in place.

This is where a strategy borrowed from the Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria in Melbourne becomes relevant. Their approach involved conducting a complete species audit — assessing every plant in the collection against projected future climate conditions — and using that information to plan a gradual, deliberate transition, removing species unlikely to be suited to the future climate and replacing them with adapted alternatives before the situation becomes critical. The key insight is timing: if this process begins early enough, new species have time to reach maturity before the plants they are replacing finally fail. Garden structure — that most precious and hardest-won quality — can therefore be maintained.

For the garden maintenance of historic Cornish gardens, this kind of long-term strategic thinking needs to become standard practice rather than a response to crisis.

Choosing replacements wisely

When plants in a historic garden do need replacing, the choice of replacement species matters enormously. The temptation is to choose whatever is robust, available, and easy. The right approach is more demanding: finding species that perform similar aesthetic and ecological functions to those being lost, while being better suited to the conditions we can expect in the coming decades.

For a garden losing Fagus sylvatica to drought stress, for instance, Ginkgo biloba, Liquidambar styraciflua, or Alnus cordata might offer similar scale and seasonal interest with considerably greater resilience. For a garden where camellias are struggling, Callistemon, Ceanothus, or Cistus can provide comparable flowering interest with far lower water requirements. These are not compromises — they are intelligent evolutions that keep faith with a garden's aesthetic character while acknowledging that the conditions have changed.

I explore this plant selection thinking in more detail in my article on how to choose plants that will thrive in a Cornish garden in the coming decades, and in my piece on Mediterranean and dry garden principles for Cornwall.

The question every garden owner must ask

The preservation versus adaptation dilemma is not confined to large historic gardens. Any garden with established planting, mature trees, or a clear sense of its own character faces a version of this question. And the starting point — for a private garden owner, a holiday home owner, or a commercial property manager — is the same: what is it about this garden that most deserves to be preserved, and what would be lost if it changed?

Answering that question clearly, and then building a maintenance and development strategy around the answer, is the foundation of genuinely thoughtful long-term garden care. It requires horticultural knowledge, patience, and a willingness to think in decades rather than seasons. It is, I believe, exactly what Cornwall's extraordinary garden heritage deserves.

Jodi Dickinson MHort(RHS) is a professional horticulturist and head gardener at the Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden, St Ives. Juniper Gardens provides specialist garden maintenance, garden design and ecological garden care across mid and west Cornwall. View Jodi's full profile here.