Hello listeners and welcome back to the Historic Royal Palaces podcast.

For today's episode, we have something a little different for you.

We look after six of the most amazing palaces with a thousand years of history between them.

But it's not just the palaces that

are in our care, it's also the historic gardens, and one of those is the Gardens of Hillsborough

Castle in Northern Ireland. So today, we're going to take you on a walk through its

tranquil grounds to immerse you in the sounds and feelings of being in these nature-filled spaces.

We've teamed up with sound artist and musician Alice Boyd to capture a stroll with Claire Woods, whose head gardener at Hillsborough Castle.

Take a moment to join us on an escape to county down in Northern Ireland.

So I'm here today at Hillsborough Castle Gardens with Claire Woods, the head gardener here. And Claire, I was wondering if you could tell me a bit about your work and what you do here.

Well, as head gardenerer I'm responsible for looking after

the gardens and all things green at Hillsborough. In total we have 98 acres and that includes formal

gardens areas like we're standing in at the moment on the south terrace as well as the lawns, the woodlands,

the woodland gardens, the Walt

Garden, and then we have other areas that people maybe don't think about, but still need managed

the likes of our car park, which has hundreds of trees in it, our overflow car park in the

Coronation Meadow, which we manage for biodiversity, gasworks field, which

is a small meadow dating right back to the 18th century, and we manage it by using moily cows

that come in and graze it.

That's amazing.

That's such a huge range of different gardens and habitats.

What was the thought process behind having so many different types of ecosystems here?

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