Oxford Botanic Garden - Part 1

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Yesterday I went to Oxford Botanic Garden. As there was so much to see, I have split this into two blogs.

Oxford is the oldest Botanic Garden in Great Britain, founded in 1621. A site near the River Cherwell was chosen, a huge wall built around the site with a grand gate for the entrance, and four thousand cartloads of “mucke and dunge” brought in to raise the ground above
the flood plain. At this point the money ran out!

But eventually a physic garden was planted, and the garden we see today started. You still enter through the grand entrance gate

There are borders under all the walls, plus oblong beds in the centre, each containing members of a particular botanical family.

This is the west-facing bed, in shade when I arrived this morning

The rest of this blog shows some of the plants that caught my eye. Libertia grandiflora, flowering in the south-facing bed. Mine never behaves like this

A large clump of trillium lutea

The tree paeony, paeonia delavayi

Buguennia tanacetifolia is new to me, to be investigated further I think

The Garden contains the National Collection of hardy euphorbia species. Euphorbia fragifera looks to be a good one

If you like the weird and wonderful, pseudopanax crassifolius from New Zealand is one for you. Eventually, this grows into a tree, but this is the juvenile form

We think of gentians as small alpines, but this is gentiana lutea, running up to flower

And veratrum viridis will be blooming soon. I wonder how they keep the slugs off of it?

My disporum sesile ‘Variegatum’ consists of one stem. I hope it will grow up to be like this

But I don’t have room for rheum palmatum atrosanguineum

Part 2 to follow

• 2 Jun, 2013
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