Hello my name's Daniel Cartwright and I'm Head Gardener here at the University's
Winterbourne House and Garden and I've been invited to take you on a short,
virtual tour of the garden this afternoon. However I would like it to be a guided tour
with a difference and although I'll give you some history of the house and garden as we walk,
I'd also like to walk for brief periods in silence when we can all consider the positive
impact that green spaces like ours can have on our mental health and wellbeing and in particular
the enormous pleasure that can be derived from simply observing nature in a garden such as ours.
The walled garden we're about to see is a really nice place to begin with the
history of the house and garden, not least of all because it is one of our best surviving examples
of the original Edwardian design. The house and garden were built in
1904 for a wealthy local family called the Nettlefolds - John and Margaret Nettlefold.
John was a wealthy local industrialist, son of one of the founding members of Guest,
Keen and Nettlefold a large manufacturing firm headquartered in Birmingham.
Margaret was a Chamberlain by birth and was in fact Joseph Chamberlain's niece.
The house and some of the hard landscaping features that you can see were designed by
local arts and crafts architect Joseph Lancaster Ball. But perhaps more interesting to me as head
gardener is to understand the inspirations and influences behind the garden's design.
The garden itself was designed by Margaret Nettlefold inspired by the work of Gertrude
Jekyll the preeminent arts and crafts garden designer in the Edwardian period.
In the Nettlefold's time the walled garden would have been used exclusively for
vegetable production and later became a rose garden. Today, although a few roses remain,
it's predominantly planted with extremely colourful summer flowering herbaceous perennials.
You'll notice either side of the archway one of the walled garden's most striking features in a
moment, this is what we call the Crinkle Crankle wall or sometimes known as a Serpentine wall.
These indentations create a slight micro-climate extremely useful for ripening wall-trained fruit.
And here you can see that we have some summer fruit, cored and trained apples and pears.
Winterbourne's third and final private owner John Macdonald Nicolson, died in 1944 and upon
his death bequeathed the house and garden to the University of Birmingham when the
University's Department of Botany assumed the responsibility for the management of the garden.
Subsequently, alongside our brilliant original Edwardian features there's
also evidence of the Department of Botany's impact upon the garden - still evident today.
Perhaps the most notable of which is this building in front of us now, that we now
refer to as the Gilbert Orchid House but when it was constructed in the 1960s by the University's
Department of Botany it was actually called the Briartron. This building was built to face
north and was built for the British Antarctic Survey who were sending back specimens from
their expeditions to the University of Birmingham to be researched upon.
However, rather than the orchid house, it's the alpine house that I'd like to take you in today.
Perhaps the most interesting plants in flower at the moment
in here are our brilliant pink and white-flowered Cyclamen Coum.
Not only. do they have brilliant pink and white flowers but also glaucus blue kidney-shaped
leaves. These are the spring flowering Cyclamen, or Sow Bread, so-called because
apparently hungry pigs are rather fond of the corms which they often find when foraging
that rest underground from which the plant emerges.
There are two commonly grown species of Cyclamen in this country
the spring-flowering Cyclamen coum and this one here which we call Cyclamen hederifolium. In
botanical Latin 'hederifolium' means 'leaves like an ivy' and I think you can see why.
Unlike Cyclamen coum, Cyclamen hederifolium flowers in the autumn.
On my right-hand side you'll see what we now call the Geographical Beds
in which different geographical zones of the world are represented
including Asia, Europe, Australasia and North America.
These were designed by the Department of Botany in the 1960s as an aid to teaching
and contain many important tree species mostly planted in the 1960s.
Perhaps the most striking is our giant Wellingtonia the dark conifer that you
can see on the right-hand side of the shot. This is about 15-20 metres tall and was
actually planted much later in the 1980s. It's so striking because in their native habitat in
the Sierra Nevada foothills in California this species can actually exceed 90 metres tall.
And now we'll enter Edgbaston Wood, a semi-natural
beech woodland containing beech trees which we believe to be around 300 years old.
Edgbaston
Pool forms part of our shared boundary with the neighboring estate Edgbaston Old Hall
and our visitors enjoy coming here to watch the waterfowl that visit the pool on a daily basis.
The 40-metre long pergola we're about to walk beneath was actually built in the 1930s
by Winterbourne's third and final private owner John MacDonald Nicolson.
Built in the arts and craft style you'll see
many similar examples in other famous arts and crafts gardens up and down the country.
Restored in 2005 it is now planted with a variety of climbing vines including
ornamental grapevines and brilliant, purple-flowered Wisteria.
One key feature of our arts and craft garden design is that gardens designed in that mode
often begin very formally around the house and then descend, almost imperceptively,
into the natural landscape beyond the further away from the architecture you walk. I think you'll
agree as we do that journey in reverse back up towards the house, leaving the woodland behind us,
that our garden here at Winterbourne is a very good example of this design technique.
Having returned to Winterbourne House and with the sun now going down I think that's an appropriate
time to finish this short, virtual, guided tour. I hope you've enjoyed walking with me
and reflecting upon the pleasures of observing nature in a garden such as Winterbourne and
also the positive impact that doing so can have on our mental health and well-being.
Thank you. Goodbye