Dunmore Pineapple
| The Dunmore Pineapple | |
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| General information | |
| Location | Scotland |
| Coordinates | 56°04′36″N 3°47′12″W / 56.07671°N 3.7867°WCoordinates: 56°04′36″N 3°47′12″W / 56.07671°N 3.7867°W |
The Dunmore Pineapple, a folly ranked "as the most bizarre building in Scotland", stands in Dunmore Park, near Airth in Stirlingshire, Scotland.
Dunmore Park, the ancestral home of the Earls of Dunmore, includes a large country mansion, Dunmore House, and grounds which contain, among other things, two large walled gardens. Walled gardens were a necessity for any great house in a northern climate in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, as a high wall of stone or brick helped to shelter the garden from wind and frost, and could create a microclimate in which the ambient temperature could be raised several degrees above that of the surrounding landscape. This allowed the cultivation of fruits and vegetables, and also of ornamental plants, which could not otherwise survive that far north.
The larger of the two gardens covers about six acres, located on a gentle south-facing slope. South-facing slopes are the ideal spot for walled gardens and for the cultivation of frost-sensitive plants. Along the north edge of the garden, the slope had probably originally been more steep. To allow both the upper and lower parts of the garden to be flat and level at different heights, it was necessary to bank up the earth on the higher northern side (away from the main house), behind a retaining wall about 16 feet (4.9 metres) high, and 3 ft 3 in (1.0 m) thick, which runs the entire length of the north side of the garden.
Walled gardens sometimes included one hollow, or double, wall which contained furnaces, openings along the side facing the garden to allow heat to escape into the garden, and chimneys or flues to draw the smoke upwards. This particularly benefited fruit trees or grape vines that could, if grown within a few feet of a heated, south-facing wall, be grown even further north than the microclimate created by a walled garden would normally allow.
A building containing a hothouse was built into this wall in 1761 by John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore. The hothouse, which was located in the ground floor of the building, was used, among other things, for growing pineapples. The south-facing ground floor, which is now covered in stucco and largely overgrown with vines, was originally covered with glass windowpanes. Additional heat was provided by a furnace-driven heating system that circulated hot air through cavities in the wall construction of the adjoining hothouse buildings. The smoke from the furnace was expelled through four chimneys, cleverly disguised as Grecian urns. The upper floor, which is at ground level when approached from the raised northern lawn, contained two small cottage-like apartments, or "bothies", for the gardeners.
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