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The Gardens Of Oxford & Oxfordshire
If you're thinking of visiting the Great Garden Challenge at Blenheim Palace then here are some other great Oxfordshire gardens you might like to take in at the same time
The University of Oxford Botanic Garden
This is Britain’s oldest botanic garden, founded in 1621 originally to “promote learning and glorify the works of God”. Some 7,000 species and 90% of all families of flowering plants are concentrated in its idyllic 4.5 acre site beside the river Cherwell, in the most compact yet diverse collection of plants in the world.
Dedicated to teaching, scientific research and conservation projects, the Botanic Garden is also an inspiration to all garden-lovers with interesting plants and planting combinations displayed in attractive beds and borders where everything is clearly labelled. Main features include the Glasshouses, Walled Garden, Water Garden and Rock Garden.
Opening Times daily 9.00am until 4.30pm (January, February, November and December)
9.00am until 5.00pm (March, April and October)Last admission 4.15pm
9.00am until 6.00pm (May to September) Last admission 5.15pm
(closed Christmas and Good Friday)
Special activities include one-day courses and family-friendly events. Rose Lane
Oxford
Tel: 01865 286690 www.botanic-garden.ox.ac.uk
Behind College Walls: Oxford’s Secret Gardens
Green retreats ‘from the restless outer world . . . places to lie down on the grass in for ever, in the happy faith that life is all a vast old English garden and time an endless summer afternoon’. Thus wrote Henry James of Oxford college gardens.
Hidden behind their ancient walls, these gardens chart changes in design and even the purpose of gardens since medieval times. Like the selection given here, many college gardens are open to the public:
Magdalen College
Hidden from prying eyes yet just a stone’s throw from Oxford’s High Street, the extensive grounds of 15th-century Magdalen include the college’s own deer park and Addison’s Walk – named after the 18th-century essayist, poet and fellow of the college, Joseph Addison. A champion of landscape gardening, Addison despised such devices as topiary, which bore “the marks of scissors on every plant and bush” advocating instead that a poet must love to “haunt the spring and meadows” where his head must be “full of the humming of bees, the bleating of flocks and the melody of birds” and where “the verdure of the grass and the embroidery of the flowers … will be painted strong in his imagination.” Addison’s rooms overlooked the Water Walk, which now takes his name. The Walk skirts fields and meadows, noted for displays of snake’s head fritillaries in the spring.
Open: 1st October – 24 June, 13.00 – 18.00 or dusk; 25 June – 30 September 12.00 – 18.00 High Street, Oxford
Tel: 01865 276000
New College
Founded in 1379, lovely New College was the first Oxford college in which quadrangle, dining hall, chapel and cloisters were designed as an entire scheme and it formed a model for later colleges. It was built within the 12th-century city walls on land that had become waste after the Black Death, on condition that the college undertook the upkeep of its section of the wall. This imposing survival now shelters a stunning herbaceous border and seats placed within its bastions. Raised sections of the garden, known as The Mount, were begun in 1594 to enable the Fellows to look out over the countryside and look down over the splendour of the garden’s early heraldic parterres.
Open: daily, Easter-October 11.00 – 17.00 (via New College Lane Gate); October - Easter 14.00 – 16.00 (via Holywell Street Gate) New College Lane
Oxford
Tel: 01865 279555
St John’s College
The east front of the Canterbury quad overlooks the garden, which was landscaped in 1770-1778 sweeping aside the strict formality of earlier designs. Three immaculate lawns are set among a delightful grove of trees and a famous rock garden, which reflects the early work of Reginald Farrer, the Father or Rock Gardening, who helped to create it when he was an undergraduate at neighbouring Balliol College, from 1898. Open: daily, 13.00 -17.00 (or dusk) St Giles
Oxford
Tel: 01865 277300
To complete your visit: A New Flowering: 1000 years of Botanical Art
The Ashmolean Museum, Beaumont Street, Oxford: 2 May – 11 September 2005
Tel: 01865 278000;www.ashmol.ox.uk
Little-seen treasures go on display as the University’s Ashmolean Museum celebrates the new “golden age” of botanical art, currently enjoying a popular following unequalled since its heyday in the 18th century.
Drawing on the rich historical treasures of Oxford's libraries and museums and on the acclaimed personal collection of guest curator Dr Shirley Sherwood, this major exhibition compares exquisite plant portraits by the finest contemporary artists with the remarkable and pioneering work produced by botanical artists of the past.
The oldest exhibit is a drawing of a thistle made by a monk in the late 11th century - the most recent a painting by Angela Mirro of a rare Peruvian slipper orchid, discovered in 2002. Treasures on display range from the University’s Tradescant's Orchard - a compilation of watercolours of garden fruit from the 1620-30s – to hugely influential works by the intrepid British artist Margaret Mee (1932 – 82), whose inspiring illustrations of endangered species from the Amazon did much to highlight the urgent need to protect the rain forest.
Admission to the Ashmolean and the Exhibition is free.
