Nearly 40 years of work by the RHS has brought it from a windswept hill with just six mature trees, to the present day Garden of 360 acres. The Garden contains the National Collection of Viburnum and an attractive plantsman’s garden of eight acres containing a woodland area, spring bulbs, ornamental ponds with lilies and fish, together with a large collection of modern roses and a rope walk of climbing and pillar roses. The Dry Garden, supported by Essex and Suffolk Water, has been designed and planted to demonstrate how a garden can be created without the need for artificial irrigation. The garden has been constructed on a sloping site of approximately 1,600sq m using large gabbro (an igneous rock related to basalt) boulders and stone mulch to give the impression of a natural rocky outcrop, similar to the environment in which many of the plants would occur in nature.