150 x 90mm landscape illustration to go in here – 1 9 – T H E C A R N E G I E C L U B Growing their own produce allows the club’s chefs to include ingredients in their dishes that are not usually easily available to them, such as Chinese artichokes. This delicacy has ribbed roots and a nutty flavour but is hard to find in the UK. Thanks to the efforts of Moir and his team, however, the Skibo kitchen has been kept stocked with this tuber. By planting a selection of varieties of the same crop – such as rhubarb – that ripen at different times through the season, the gardeners ensure the chefs have access to a consistent supply of produce. Similarly, a rolling supply of salad crops is maintained with vegetables such as lettuce planted on rotation. The work in the walled garden continues in 2018, with 144 fruit trees – a mix of apple, apricot, gages, plums and pears – being planted. In addition to these native trees, at Lindsay’s request, Moir has also acquired a yuzu tree. Native to Japan, the citrus was used in last summer’s tartare of langoustine with yuzu-soy dish and it is hoped that this year the club will produce its own fruit to use in the kitchen. The expansion of Skibo’s garden larder has continued beyond the confines of the walled garden. The kitchen garden on the estate’s croft, for example, played host to both a pumpkin patch and healthy crop of sweetcorn, which for the Scottish Highlands is no mean feat and can be in part attributed to the unique Dornoch microclimate that brings warmer temperatures and lighter rainfall to the area. Meanwhile, the ongoing renovations to the Victorian glasshouse complex have permitted more delicate produce to flourish. The tomatoes enjoyed by guests last summer, for instance, were hand-picked each day in the tomato house by the chef responsible for the dish that evening. Moir and Mackay also enjoyed experimenting with some rather unusual ingredients in 2017. With thousands of birch trees on the estate, Moir realised that Skibo was stocked with a natural larder, as birch are like maple: their sap can be harvested and transformed into syrup. ‘I’d been reading a book on foraging and that’s where I came across the idea,’ he says. It was, it appears, serendipitous timing. ‘There are only about two to three weeks out of the year that you can gather the sap, and I was reading about it just as that window was about to open.’ Mackay says that the syrup is similar to maple syrup in flavour but ‘with an earthier, almost beer-like note’. He added a new twist to some trusty Skibo favourites, incorporating the 1990s, the garden was mainly ornamental until 2017, when an ambitious project to return the walled garden to its former use commenced. This reversion was driven partly by a desire to return it to its historic function, and partly by demand. Increasingly over the past few years, the club has tried to offer as much of its own produce as possible. Fruits and vegetables are home-grown, honey is produced by hives on the estate tended to by executive chef Craig Rowland, and preserves are crafted – by castle head chef Lindsay Mackay’s mum – in nearby Helmsdale from soft fruits grown in the castle’s grounds. Skibo’s head gardener William Moir had a simple philosophy for the walled garden’s redesign: everything grown there had to be used within the castle. That meant either food crops to be used in the kitchen, or flowers that the club’s in-house florist Liz Shennan could use in arrangements around the castle. Inspired by Mawson’s design aesthetic, the new beds consist of a central series of concentric round beds, with the surrounding beds planted in clean lines. In the central bed, a ‘Sunset’ apple tree has been planted. This tree has, according to Moir, ‘a blossom to rival a cherry tree’ and is ringed by an inner row of bright red roses and an outer circle of lavender. Apples from the tree will be used by the chefs, as will the rose petals and lavender, which will both be incorporated into desserts. years, however, some of these lost gardens are being restored and returned to their former productivity – including the walled garden at Skibo. Skibo’s walled garden predates the arrival of Andrew Carnegie by at least three decades – it can be found on an 1874 OS map and is thought to date from many years prior to then. Originally divided into four sections by beech hedging, its layout was altered in 1904 when Thomas Mawson – one of Britain’s most esteemed landscape architects – was engaged by Carnegie to redesign the castle grounds. An antique ledger in the castle records the payment of £305 18s 9d (approximately £35,000 today) to Mawson for ‘drawing plans and for proposed improvements at Castle gardens’. Influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement, Mawson favoured clean, simple lines and much of his original design – including the fountain on the south lawn and the terrace beds – remains in situ today. Not all his plans came to fruition, however – Mawson originally envisaged a large walled kitchen-garden to be built to the west of the glasshouse range, but this was never instituted. Instead, the walled garden continued to be used to grow fruits and vegetables – along with flowers such as roses – for much of the 20th century, but by the time the Carnegie family sold Skibo in 1982, large portions of the walled garden had been given over to low-maintenance planting and the vegetable plots had been replaced by heathers. While soft fruit cages were installed in the D E S I G N