Plot to Plate: New developments in the Walled Garden at Harewood

The Gardens are waking up after a long and exceptionally severe Yorkshire winter...

The Gardens team are now busy at work on the new vegetable beds in the Walled Garden at Harewood. This new kitchen garden is very much a team project with the Gardeners, Catering staff and Volunteers all working together to make the Harewood plot-to-plate plan a reality.

The Walled Garden at Harewood will revive the tradition of growing food on site to support the House and Estate and as part of our continuing support of local growers, reducing food miles and home-grown produce these new vegetable beds will supply both the Courtyard Shop and Café – so you’ll be seeing the food grown here on the menu in the café too!

As you can see from the pictures, the new beds are huge, much bigger than even the Gardeners had envisaged when they marked them out. Muck-spreading is the first job with sowing taking place late March to early June - parsnips, beetroot, carrots, potatoes, cabbages; many of which are new varieties for 2010. Next time you visit, take a stroll around the lakeside to the Walled Garden and see how work is progressing!

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Conferences, Corporate Hospitality and Christmas

On Thursday the sales team went off to the Yorkshire Conference and Hospitality Show at Savilles near the Royal Armouries. It was the first time in a ages that we've been to a corporate exhibition. Our new stand, which had been put together at a rapid rate of knots by the amazing Beck Marriott, was a roaring success. We attracted 15% of the total visitors to the show on the day.

Among the many attractions to our stand were the delicious mulled wine and mince pies, prepared by our fantastic hospitality team. Yes it was a bit early for mince pies but there was method in this madness. We were launching our Christmas party options and working on developing awareness of Harewood as a Christmas party venue.

Here is a short video of the stand. It was videoed using a mobile phone so the quality is fairly low.


On Friday we hosted 20 Conference buyers, from Conference Leeds, to lunch and a show around. A great bunch they were too. Fortunately the sun shone as we showed them our new Pavilion which will hold over a 1000 theatre style when it has been completed. Maggie Mash and Sue Sharpe provided us with an excellent tour of the State Floor and highlighted that the House has always been used for business as well as pleasure.

To end the lunch we asked for a volunteer. We didn't say what they were volunteering for. But Rachel was very overexcited when we told her it was to feed our penguins.

This is just the start of Harewood's drive to be the best conference venue in Leeds.

Family activities at half term

Harewood has opened for half term, the weather has been cold, sometimes clear, sometimes wet!
However there has been lots going on. One of the most popular activities has been the felt puppet making of tiger puppets to celebrate the Chinese year of the Tiger. in fact it has been so popular that Jennifer Auty, one of our Learning and Access Officers (she provides fabulous ideas for school trips) has had to go an buy more felt for the puppets twice! Here she is making a prototype puppet.

Today is Shrove Tuesday or now more popularly known as Pancake Day. It has been a spectacular success today with a huge number of families coming to see the demonstrations and get some ideas for their own pancakes. The pancake tossing was particularly popular. This year we will be doing a lot more food demonstrations in the Old Kitchen.

Autumn Glory Fun and Scarecrows!

Autumn Glory has been a great success with the most glorious array of Autumn colour we have seen in years. Harewood's grounds look beautiful at this time of year and it's also a great opportunity to get the family out of the house this half term!

The event is only halfway through so there's plentry more half term activities and family fun still to come. The weather forcast for the next few days is great so why not come along and explore Harewood this Autumn!

You can upload your own Autumn Glory images and snaps to our Facebook site...please do so as we'd love to see them!

Family Days out at Half term

Autumn Glory is set to be spectacular this year with good weather promised and the leaves turning red and gold as we speak!

Autumn Glory celebrates all things Autumnal with half term activities, treats and experiences for everyone to enjoy. The week will be packed with things to see and do including…

• Make A Wish Entertainment
• Scavenger Hunt Trails
• Fun in the Bird Garden
• Autumn Leaf Hunt Prize Draw
• Childrens Art Activities
• Scarecrow Trails
• Face Painting
• Biscuit Decorating
• The Good Soup Company
• Lottie Shaw's Parkin
• Twilight Tales
• Diwali Celebrations
• Weaving and Spinning Demonstrations
• Autumnal Crafts
• Silversmithing Family Workshops

Different activities and entertainments every day, for a full programme please visit the website.

Autumn Glory
Sunday 25 October 2009 - Sunday 1 November 2009
Daily, 10.00am to 4.00pm
Half Term Fun for all the Family
You can Book Now on our website!

Harewood is a great place for family days out take a look on the website, pay us a visit and see why!

A Flamingo Chick Called Flimgo

We've finally got a name for our flamingo chick...who shall now be know as 'Flimgo'!
Some of the suggestions we had were:

• Snowball
• Flimgo
• Flingo
• Harry
• Lucky
• Julian Clarey
• Pinky
• Pinkish
• Fluffy
• Fennella the flamingo
• Phoebie the Flamingo
• John’s little Miracle
• Alice (as in wonderland)

The little guy/girl is now approx 70cm high, fully stood up.

It’s been feeding itself from the lower food bowl provided for just over two weeks now, but is still also being fed by the parents. When they regurgitate the ‘crop milk’, it’s a bright pink colour, this will slowly be reduced by the parents as the chick gets older.

At the moment it still has its grey downy juvenile plumage, but has small primary flight pin feathers developing on its wings, and some pin feathers on its body. This means it’s gradually getting adult plumage, but will still be a grey colour until next year.

It can be seen resting on one leg as the adult Flamingos do and can now swim quite well.

It’s also now large enough to be tucked up overnight in the boat house winter quarters with all the adults, without the risk of it being trampled on, or pecked by other adult Flamingos.

Sponsor our flamingo chick or find out more about flamingos on our website.

The Horse at Harewood art exhibition

'The Horse at Harewood' exhibition has been quite a journey of discovery for the curatorial team - although there have always been horses here, and we're all aware of their role in the history of the Estate and the Lascelles family - we've never before placed such a focus on this area of Harewood's history and the artworks arising from it. The works now on show in the Terrace Gallery were collected from all over the House, some had literally barely seen the light of day for decades, and most have never been seen publicly before. This posed quite a few challenges: some of the works needed conservation and most needed cleaning to remove varnish which has yellowed over the years. Most of all we needed to reconstruct the story of how and why these pictures, and the artists who painted them, came to be at Harewood. We know that the 6th Earl and HRH Princess Mary kept racehorses and even established a stud farm at Harewood, and of course we have photographs of some of their horses too. But there's a lot of work to do to identify individual horses, reconstruct their racing successes, and piece together the commissioning of the horse portraits now in the Collection. This exhibition is really the start of something, an investigation into part of Harewood's history, and it's a rich and exciting area to be working in. We hope to revisit this theme with another exhibition in a few years' time once we've pieced that story together, and had the necessary conservation work carried out, and we also intend to publish a book on the subject too.