The Rock Garden
Get the behind the scenes story from our Curator about an exciting new development at the Botanic Garden
As with many things in the Botanic Garden during the crisis, the focus of the team has been core activities which can be done with a limited team, particularly essential watering and sustaining the plant collection.
However, quiet progress has been made concerning the Rock Garden in the Lower Garden. The feature will be extended using rock from a quarry in Dorset. The rock currently sits at the Arboretum where it awaits transportation into the city. Ben, the Curator of the Arboretum, and his team will assist in this task, and it goes without saying we anticipate the task with a mixture of trepidation but also enthusiasm, where there is a will there is a way! Once in place, it will create additional relief to the landscape and this area will provide a home to flora encountered in the Levant by John Sibthorp (1758–96), the third Sherardian Professor of Botany at Oxford.
Several tonnes of specialist pre-prepared Rock Garden soil mix has arrived from our supplier in Leicestershire and is in place, ready to replace and improve the original soil in and around the existing rocks.
Throughout the winter and spring, there has been significant progress made to repopulate the Rock Garden with flora depicted in Sibthorp’s Flora Graeca, which is among the most magnificent floras ever written and was published between 1806 and 1840. A few existing plants have been repropagated, trees and shrubs have been acquired from nurseries and Russell (one of our talented horticulturalists) has raised numerous seeds and bulbs, some sourced from other botanic gardens in Europe. We will have a veritable forest of Dracunculus vulgaris to look forward to in the future. Once we have an opportunity to travel again our colleagues at Cambridge University Botanic Garden have also kindly offered material for collection.
To enable visitors to understand the purpose of the collection new interpretation has been thoughtfully prepared and beautifully illustrates the journey’s made through the Levant by Sibthorp. The new planting will follow a journey through mainland Greece, Crete, Cyprus and Turkey.
Inevitably we would have preferred to have been much more advanced in our progress, but all of the ingredients are in place ready to re-vitalise this important section of the Garden and tell the story, through plants, of one of Oxford Botanic Garden’s most import important and significant individuals.
Mark Brent
Oxford Botanic Garden Curator and Head of Horticulture
Oxford Botanic Garden & Arboretum
