Korean Horticultural Heritage Comes to Hergest Croft: A Fifty-Year Story Bears Fruit

Hergest Croft Gardens is proud to celebrate a milestone in one of horticulture’s most

enduring international partnerships. This spring, gardeners and garden designers Eun

Kyung Jung, Heehyeok Kang, and Jaeheon Kim travelled from Chollipo Arboretum in

South Korea to visit Hergest Croft ahead of their show garden appearance at RHS

Malvern Spring Festival.

Their exhibit, The Blessings from the Sea, tells the story of Chollipo Arboretum —

Korea’s first private arboretum, founded by the late Carl Ferris Miller, who

transformed barren coastal land into a world-renowned botanical sanctuary. The visit

offered Hergest Croft a rare opportunity to share the living legacy of that vision: over

seventy plants grown from Ferris Miller’s own wild collections, gathered from 1983

onwards, are still flourishing in the gardens today.

The connection between the two gardens stretches back even further. In 1976, Sir

Harold and Lady Hillier joined Robert and Jelena de Belder of the Kalmthout and

Hemelrijk Arboreta in Belgium on an expedition to South Korea, collecting several

plants that likely originated at Chollipo. Among them was Acer micranthum, a

Japanese endemic whose presence in the collection hints at Chollipo’s role as an early

source.

The collections held at Hergest Croft include plants of real conservation significance.

Heehyeok Kang, who has walked the same Korean landscapes as Ferris Miller,

provided valuable insight into the current plight of species such as Tsuga sieboldii, a

hemlock becoming increasingly scarce in Korea, collected by Ferris Miller from the

island of Ulleungdo. Acer pentaphyllum, native to China and brought to Hergest Croft

from Chollipo by Lawrence Banks in 2000, represents another important ex-situ

conservation success.

Not all the plants owe their value to rarity alone. A particularly fine form of Acer

triflorum, grown from seed received in 1983, so impressed the team that Hergest Croft

intends to register it as a named cultivar, ‘Chollipo’, in recognition of its outstanding

horticultural merit. The Korean native Rhododendron mucronulatum, flowering

beautifully in the gardens, drew equal excitement from the visiting team, who

lamented that it is too rarely offered in nursery trade.

Two of the Ferris Miller introductions have received the distinction of illustration in

Curtis’s Botanical Magazine by botanical artist Christine Battle. Neoshirakia japonica,

collected on Mount Wolchulsan in South Jeolla Province, was described by Harry

Baldwin for its exceptional autumn colour. Lindera obtusiloba, from the Sorak

mountains and equally prized for its warm yellow autumn foliage, was written about

by Roy Lancaster and Martyn Rix.

The visit also helped solve a small mystery of garden history. Working with Eun Kyung

Jung, the team was able to confirm that Lawrence and Elizabeth Banks, who visited

Chollipo as guests of Carl Ferris Miller around 1995, stayed in the Magnolia House,

where Elizabeth recalls looking out over thousands of magnolia seedlings in bloom.

Lawrence later named the finest of these ‘Strawberries and Cream’. The original tree

still flowers at Chollipo today; grafted scions growing at Hergest Croft are only now

beginning to bloom.