Wakehurst Place is an estate, an old 16th century mansion and gardens, predominantly 20th century, located near the village of Ardingly in West Sussex. The gardens are part of the Royal Botanic Gardens and cover an area of two square kilometres. The gardens were mainly created by Gerald Loder, the first Baron Wakehurst, who bought the estate in 1903 and spent 33 years planning, cultivating and caring for the garden. His successor was Sir Henry Price, who bequeathed the gardens to the state in 1963, and in 1965 the gardens were taken over by the Royal Botanic Gardens. Now Wakehurst Place is the property of the National Trust of Great Britain.
Wakehurst Place is home to Britain's largest Christmas tree, a 35-metre-tall giant sequoia that lights up with 1,800 lights on Christmas Eve.
This is home to a national collection of different species of birch, beech, St John's wort and skimmia. Also in Wakehurst Place is the Millennium Seed Bank - a repository for seeds of various plant species. The seeds are dried, placed in glass jars and stored in an underground vault at -20 degrees Celsius. Experts say that such seeds will be suitable for breeding for years to come, allowing plants that have disappeared from the face of the earth to recover. The seed bank was founded in 2000, which is why it is called the Millennium Seed Bank. It is an international project, with a wide range of countries participating. It now has several million seeds of 24,000 species of plants (10 per cent of all the plants on earth).
