The Beer Gardens
Ours are no ordinary Beer Gardens!
Visitors can enjoy a drink or a pizza outside year-round (kids and dogs welcome, someone once brought a ferret too), and the Beer Garden is easy to access step-free from our large car park. For a special event like a wedding or party, we can offer exclusive use of our gardens – just get in touch to discuss your needs.
We’re lucky to have gardens wrapping around three sides of our pub, and since taking over in 2021 Grizedale Arts has been able to develop the gardens with input from our dedicated gardening team, visiting artists / makers and our volunteers. Our picnic tables now surround a vibrant herbaceous border that was formerly a soggy lawn dotted with supermarket carpark shrubs. Our outdoor pizza oven and award winning off-grid Cold Store add architectural interest to the gardens in this area too. On the south facing side of the pub, which in the past was a much-used entrance, we inherited a crazy paved sunken patio. For now, we have used half barrels of shrubs and perennials and bulbs to improve this space, also planting a trained red grape to create shade. Horrendous flooding from the road above through this area in December 2025 showed us that radically rethinking this garden in the future would be wise, as large areas of impermeable landscaping like this are no longer viable with year round heavy rainfall becoming ever more common.
We have just half a day of professional garden maintenance a week – although as it’s from the gifted Anna Burton, it’s more like a few days of help by any mere mortal! The incredible Farmer’s Arms Gardening School meets monthly year round and they also contribute much to the upkeep of our gardens, as do participants on our regular workshops and classes. We choose hard-working resilient plants such as persicaria, grasses and crocosmia interspersed with self sown foxgloves and biennials like verbascum. A robust rambling rose and spring bulbs edge the workshop walls. We grow an incredible 12 varieties of mint in a dedicated bed, and use these in our kitchen and bar, and in workshops. Most propagation is done inhouse from existing stock at Grizedale Arts’ residency space Lawson Park, and we plant in a naturalistic, loose style that makes the most of the surrounding landscape and the changing seasons.
Grizedale Arts thanks the National Lottery Community Fund, Friends of the Lake District and Cumbria Community Fund for supporting our land-based and biodiversity enhancement projects.
