Lord Lumley of Lumley Castle, County Durham, laid out England's first large-scale symbolic garden in the Italian Mannerist style for Henry VIII's greatest palace, Nonsuch in Surrey. The place is a byword for vanished splendour.

Northumberland gardeners were early experimenters with heated walls for ripening exotic fruit outdoors. A section of the wall at Fallodon Hall in Northumberland has a furnace and heating ducts and may be the work of Samuel Salkeld, a noted horticulturist in the late 17th century. In 1775, the Newcastle Journal reported that Thomas Carr of Eshott in Northumberland, an acknowledged expert in growing pineapples, was using sea-sand instead of tanner's bark as a growing base and was achieving fruit of over three pounds each.

William Falla of Gateshead was one of several local nurseries (including Joyce's) with a national reputation and was described as being one of the most extensive in England (1834). It supplied everything from trees to seeds, and was patronised by such as George Bowes at Gibside and Joseph Spence, the prebendary at Durham. The business had been established in Hebburn by the first William Falla (1739-1804) and moved to Felling by William Falla II (1761-1830). By 1827, the catalogue offered no fewer than 415 varieties of fruit trees. William Falla II was a founding member of the Botanical and Horticultural Society of Durham, Noerthumberland and Newcastle upon Tyne. Alas, William Falla III (1799-1836) was no match for his father's acumen and committed suicide in Ravensworth Woods, when unable to satisfy his creditors.

Though the fact seems little known, winter temperatures are roughly the same throughout lowland eastern England, north or south. Frost varies with distance from the sea. The famous political commentator William Cobbett, author of Rural Rides, visited the North East in 1832 and observed that in Tynedale the biennial stocks stood the winter without covering 'which, as everyone knows, is by no means the case even at Kensington or Fulham.'

One of the most celebrated gardeners of modern times, Gretrude Jekyll (1843-1932) visited in 1906. She travelled by rail with Edwin Lutyens, the great architect, and sucked on bull’s eyes, while Lutyens carried an injured raven in a Gladstone bag. She laid out a small walled garden just north of the castle on Holy Island in 1911. It is mostly stone-paved and the plants grow up through the paving. Jekyll also designed woodland gardens for Lord Ridley at Blagdon in 1928-29. In all she designed nearly 300 gardens for her friend, Edwin Lutyens who himself laid out a formal garden at Blagdon, with a canal and fountain as focal points, and after 1902, converted the Tudor castle on Holy Island as a holiday home for Edward Hudson, the owner of Country Life.
In 1918, Lytton Strachey visited Lindisfarne Castle. He describes it as: 'very dark with nowhere to sit and nothing but stone under, above and round you.'