The Duchess and Her Garden - NYTimes.com

• “THE criticism I’ve had is just massive,” said the Duchess of Northumberland, as she led a visitor through the Bamboo Labyrinth of Alnwick Garden. “It’s really staggering the way that Britain views this project. They said I am to gardens what Imelda Marcos is to shoes.”
• what she has done with these 14 acres at Alnwick Castle, her husband’s ancestral home — and what she hopes to do with them in the future, and the money that all this involves — has indeed stirred controversy, in worlds as diverse as the English gardening establishment, the British Parliament and the press. What started as a whim of the new duchess, who saw a chance to create a modern counterpoint to the adjacent 18th-century landscape designed by Lancelot (Capability) Brown, has become one of the most ambitious public gardens created in Europe since World War II, a rollicking tourist attraction widely known as the Versailles of the North.
• “In England, if you’re married to a duke and raise your head above the parapet and do something on this scale, it’s considered to be overly ambitious,” she said. “The attitude is that you should stay in your castle.”

• “To do anything,” she told the duke, “I’m going to need a million pounds.” But over the next year, her vision became grander, expanding to encompass a public garden that would draw visitors from all over the country. The duke eventually put in £8 million (about $12 million at the time) through his charitable trust, half in the form of a loan, and the duchess embarked on a fund-raising campaign that is still ongoing.

  She also became increasingly determined that the garden should be modern, not a recreation of Alnwick’s long-derelict 18th- and 19th-century gardens — a decision, she said, that would lead to the first of her troubles.