LANDSCAPE designers are drawing their inspiration from watercolour paintings hanging in a North-East museum to help recreate one of the England's most important 18th Century forest gardens.

The Forestry Commission and The National Trust have joined forces to restore magnificent woodlands in the Grade I listed grounds of the Gibside Estate, Rowlands Gill, Tyne and Wear.

The estate is one of few early 18th Century designed landscapes to escape latter re-modelling.

However, the wood's fortunes declined along with those of the estate in the first part of the last century, culminating in the felling of many trees in the 1940s to help the war effort. Soon after, the Forestry Commission moved in to plant fast growing conifers to bolster the nation's low timber reserves.

Now foresters and National Trust experts have pored over watercolours of Gibside by William Turner (1817), now at the Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle, to produce a blueprint which will see the grand vistas reinstated and classical planting patterns revived.

The strategy will involve removing 40,000 western hemlock conifers and take nearly 50 years to complete. First felling is due in the New Year.

The estate is the former home of the late Queen Mother's family, the Bowes Lyons.