“These plants would have been the Van Dycks of their day, there was that much kudos attached to them,” said the head gardener Scott Jamieson, in front of some of the oldest, rarest camellias in the western world, which are flourishing, despite the odds, in South Yorkshire.
Jamieson has led a team on a remarkable £5m heritage project. On Friday, the restored camellia house at Wentworth Woodhouse, one of the grandest stately homes in Britain, was formally opened as a global teahouse.
For the shrubs to have survived and to look so good in their new rarefied home is, all involved in the project agree, a wonderful thing. Nobody minds that outsiders are surprised they are in Rotherham.
The camellias were imported for Britain’s wealthy families in the 18th century on merchant ships belonging to the East India Company. They were, wrongly, judged so precious and fragile that they needed to be pampered in a building with lots of light and a stove to heat the brick walls, so that is what they got.
Some of the first camellias to arrive from China came to Wentworth Woodhouse, with each plant said to cost the house’s aristocratic owner, the 4th Earl Fitzwilliam, the equivalent of a housemaid’s annual wage.
Wentworth Woodhouse and its estate began falling it into decline in the late 1900s. From the 1940s, its nearest neighbour, just feet away, was an opencast coalmine. By the 1980s, the camellia house and its shrubs were either forgotten or considered beyond saving.
The building was derelict and dangerous, said Jamieson, with “broken glass held on by spiderwebs and goodwill. You couldn’t come in to do anything. The plants were through the roof, bursting through the windows surrounded by elders, nettles and brambles.”
When it began to emerge that the out-of-control Rotherham camellias were some of the oldest in the western world, horticulturalists were excited. It was like finding a wondrous and unknown library of rare first editions, camellia experts said.
So began the project to bring the Grade II*-listed camellia house back to life.
Dorian Proudfoot, an architect at Donald Insall Associates, said protecting the camellias during the building work had been a priority.
“They were treated like absolute royalty the whole time,” he said. “It was an ongoing joke of ‘are you going to kill the camellias’, which would obviously have been a disaster.”
They were protected as much as possible but were still covered in sawdust and brick dust once the contractors had finished.
Jamieson said: “It is just incredible to see them looking so smart as they do now,. Every leaf was pretty much polished by hand.”
The project has had £4m from the National Lottery Heritage Fund and just over £614,000 from Historic England.
The house has been brought back to life as part of a wider project to restore Wentworth Woodhouse, a spectacular Georgian palace that was once home to paintings such as George Stubbs’ Whistlejacket, a star of the National Gallery.
It is a huge task, given the building, often described as Britain’s biggest house, is twice as wide as Buckingham Palace, has 124,600 sq ft of living space, more than a hectare of roofs, and a room for every day of the year.
Part of the mission is to raise the area’s profile. Sarah McLeod, the preservation trust’s chief executive, said: “Nobody thinks let’s go on holiday to South Yorkshire. Let’s go on a trip to Rotherham. They think of North Yorkshire or Scarborough or York so I think we have an opportunity to put this part of the world on the map with Wentworth.”
Another part of it is about inclusivity. The teahouse will be a global one, open to everyone. “Tea is such a great leveller,” McLeod said. “Our whole mission at Wentworth is to make culture available to everybody.
“Both myself and the chair here [the entrepreneur Julie Kenny] grew up in low-income households and we both feel we missed out. We didn’t get to play a musical instrument, we didn’t get to go on art trips … so our mission is to ensure that everybody feels welcome. That’s one reason we decided to make it a global teahouse. Everyone loves a cuppa.”
It was a very romantic place, McLeod said, and had already been the venue for a marriage proposal.
“A member of the public, a woman, asked if she could come in on 29 February to propose. He said yes. That was lovely and felt like a really nice start to the camellia house … it was all about love. We are big hippy-dippies here, I’m afraid.”
The formal opening was on Friday and the building opens to the public on 2 April.
