A garden of 3,000 roses has been created at one of our most beautiful stately homes. Chris Webber went along to smell the roses.

MAGISTERIAL Wynyard Hall is, no doubt, a long way from an Ashington coal miner's pit house garden in the 1940s...but the beauty of a rose is a beauty that transcends.

It's a visual and fragrant beauty that our greatest poets, Shakespeare included, have admired, but anyone, coal miner's sons and highly successful businessmen like Sir John Hall most certainly included, can fall in love with.

Make no mistake this rose garden, which will eventually double in size and become the biggest in the country, is the vision of Sir John, owner of Wynyard Hall since 1987.

And, unlikely as it may sound, it is a vision that began when Sir John was a 14-year-old boy soon due to go down the Ashington coal mines himself. "All coal miners' cottages in those days had long gardens at the rear, where the men would grow vegetables to supplement their incomes," he explains, sat among the roses, "but my dad gave me a small piece of the garden to grow my roses.

"I was fascinated by them. I tried to teach myself how to graft them, to take a cutting from one rose to grow another, but my fingers were clumsy and I I struggled to get it right. I loved everything about them, especially their colours and their beautiful fragrance. In that garden I made a promise to myself that one day I would have a rose garden of my own."

Most of us might think a few roses by the potato patch might suffice, and, to be fair, Sir John often did grow roses in his various homes down the years. But this is something else: a vision of colour that stretches ahead. Visitors enter through the impressive £1m visitor centre, with its painstakingly sourced produce, "they spent six weeks sourcing a single pasta for the Italian table," laughs one member of Sir John's PR team. Others will be tempted to linger in a nice-looking cafe.

On leaving the visitor centre one is, of course, greeted by visual beauty but also by the lovely smell of 3,000 roses. It is not overpowering at all, in fact it is subtle as it will take another month for the roses to be in full bloom. But it is thoroughly pleasant.

The garden has been designed by Alistair Baldwin, an landscape architect, who describes it as a once in a career opportunity before outlining what he has tried to achieve. The roses have been chosen for the hardiness, but also to be bold in colour. For this is not a botanical, educational garden but, in Mr Baldwin's words, "a place of delight." The idea is simply to have a garden for sensory enjoyment, somewhere to have a pleasant day out. And the rose is Queen here. "Any other plant that might steal the show from the rose was off the list," he smiles. "It was very difficult sometimes."

The roses themselves were chosen by Michael Marriott, of renowned rose specialists David Austin Roses. He kindly takes time to discuss the transcendent beauty of the rose and humankind's relationship with them. He explains they were grown by ancient Greeks and Romans purely for aesthetic reasons four thousand years ago. And yet the simple dog rose, sweet briar and Scottish rose have grown wild in our land forever and have their own beauty.

Afterwards Sir John outlines his plans and what might be achieved. "I'm an Englishman," he proclaims, "and I'm very, very proud that the rose is the symbol of England. I am determined it will be the biggest rose garden in Britain. The North-East needs a symbol. We have Alnwick Gardens in the north and now Wynyard in the south.

“I would like us, and all the gardens in between, to get together to create a garden trail, it could be the Bernicia garden trail named after the ancient name of the North-East. I would hope that this would bring in people from outside the area to see what we have on offer.”

The glory of Wynyard gardens won't just be the rose garden which just one aspect of a £5.3m plan. The first stage of the project was the £1.7m installation of the Grand Marquee and Marquee Garden, for weddings and large scale corporate events and further stages will include a £2 million investment in the creation of a cookery school, children’s garden and valley walks through the parkland.

All very exciting. But, of course nothing quite captures the human imagination like that of a simple rose.

*The official opening will take place on August 4, where Sir John Hall and the UK’s leading rose expert Michael Marriott will cut the ribbon to declare it officially open, which has sold out. Normal admission prices will be £5 for adults and £2 for children aged between five and 12. There will also be a family pass for £14 and an annual pass for £30. Call 01740 644 811 to find out more