Qualla: Trelissick

Trelissick: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rod Allday, CC BY-SA 2.0. The flowers in this garden have a strange double life. From the 1930s onward, the camellias and hydrangeas that bloomed above the King Harry Ferry were carried back to Stoke-on-Trent and painted onto Spode china by the factory's flower artists. Ronald Copeland, the chairman of the Spode works, lived here. He and his wife Ida wanted living models for the pattern books, so the rhododendron beds at Trelissick effectively became a sample library for one of England's great pottery houses. The Cornish blossoms went out into the world as porcelain. Stand at the long terrace today, looking across the Carrick Roads to Falmouth, and you are standing in a garden that flowered twice: once on the bush, once in glaze.

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Image: Rod Allday | CC BY-SA 2.0

Trelissick: Leidic's Farm

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ben Salter from Wales, CC BY 2.0. The name Trelissick was first recorded in 1275 and means "Leidic's farm," a Cornish settlement that long predates anything you see here now. The house was designed around 1750 for John Lawrence by the paternal grandfather of Humphry Davy, the chemist who would later invent the mi...

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Image: Ben Salter from Wales | CC BY 2.0

Trelissick: The Flowers That Became China

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Original uploader was Mammal4 at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. Ida Copeland gave Trelissick to the National Trust in 1955, after the death of her son Geoffrey, on the understanding the family could continue to live in the house. She left a stained glass window bearing the Copeland coat of arms in Feock parish church. The flowers she and her ...

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Image: Original uploader was Mammal4 at en.wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0

Trelissick: Squirrels and Sea Captains

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tim Green from Bradford, UK, CC BY 2.0. On a Victorian Gothic water tower, paired with that horse's head, stand carved squirrels. They are not decorative whim but a memorial. The Davies-Gilbert family lived here in the second half of the 19th century, and their ancestor was Sir Humphrey Gilbert, an Elizabethan explorer...

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Image: Tim Green from Bradford, UK | CC BY 2.0

Trelissick: Above the Estuary

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Neil Kennedy, CC BY-SA 2.0. Pass beneath the high oaks at the far end of the garden and the view opens. The Fal estuary swings south toward Falmouth, the King Harry Ferry crawling on its chains across the water below, dwarfed by laid-up cargo ships that often shelter in the deep channel here. More than 200,...

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Image: Neil Kennedy | CC BY-SA 2.0