SPEAKER: Caroline Holmes.

The Alnwick Garden was inspired by Jane Northumberland with Wirtz International as designers. Reputedly Europe’s largest new garden, it showcases traditional and cutting edge designs. Green leaves serve many potent functions: some sound perilous but who would have thought of lettuces and Traveller’s Joy as harbingers of dangerous intoxication. At the base of the Great Cascade, fenced, walled and gated, lies The Poison Garden where I was commissioned to devise a fatal attraction of plants.