Bridge End Garden, Saffron Walden

click photo to enlarge
Bridge End Garden in Saffron Walden, Essex, was largely created in the 1840s by the Gibsons, a wealthy Quaker family with links to banking and brewing. Unusually, it didn't adjoin their residential property and they would have had to walk a short distance to enjoy its beauty.

The Garden is subdivided into seven smaller, themed areas that include a Dutch garden, maze, rose garden and kitchen garden. It features a number of carved plaques and statues that date from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, some made of Coade stone. A brick pavilion and a larger summer house also remain from the 1840s. Given the distance between the family home and their garden these small buildings would have been not only pleasant places to sit but also essential places of retreat from inclement weather.

The gardens suffered a gentle decline during the twentieth century and towards the end of that period were in need of attention. In 2003 a major programme of restoration was undertaken by the local community with the help of Heritage Lottery Funding and sums from other charitable bodies. Over a five year period a transformation was achieved. The aim was to return the gardens to very much the condition they exhibited at their flourishing best. So, species were planted that were available in the 1840s and the restoration of the built fabric was undertaken with sensitivity to the original materials. The kitchen garden restoration was part of the second phase of work and two Victorian-style greenhouses were installed. One of these has soft fruits such as peaches, nectarines and apricots, the other features citrus fruits such as orange, lemon and lime. Part of one of the greenhouses is used to grow annuals to display in the newly constructed plant theatre.

The gardens are open to the public, free, and offer much of interest to the visitor. They are a fine example of what can be achieved by the goodwill, effort and imagination of a community working together for a common and shared goal.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 47mm
F No: f8
Shutter Speed: 1/40 sec
ISO: 125
Exposure Compensation: -1.0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Plant Theatres and Wikipedia

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I remember reading somewhere, a while ago, that it's possible to download all of Wikipedia (minus the images). Apparently it comes to about 10 gigabytes of data. That piece of information came in the context of an article about schools in parts of the world where there is no internet access. It seems some are putting the file on a hard drive that pupils at workstations around the school can access. It sounds like a good idea.

I've been impressed by Wikipedia since its inception. I like the idea that underpins the website - that people with an interest or knowledge of a subject can write an article about it and that others can edit it: that there are certain standards against which the articles are measured, yet incomplete articles can be posted and are marked as such: and that the project manages to be both successful and accurate without the involvement of a traditional publisher, university or established producer of encyclopedias. There are a few people who remain sniffy about its accuracy, the range of subjects it covers, etc, but the fact is it compares very well with commercial offerings on every count and is far more extensive than any other encyclopedia. I rarely go to Wikipedia in search of information about a subject and fail to find something useful.

But, it happened the other day! I wanted to find out a little more about Plant Theatres and I discovered that there is no Wikipedia article on the subject nor are there references to plant theatres in other articles - at least not to the kind of plant theatre that I had in mind. Today's photograph is one that I took in Bridge End Gardens, Saffron Walden, Essex. It shows a large, outdoor plant theatre. Such a device is invariably a tiered arrangement of shelves, often, as here, in a frame or "proscenium arch", designed to show off pot plants. They were popular in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in a number of European countries and were particularly used to display Primula auriculas. Smaller examples were used indoors or in glasshouses. The plant theatre shown is a larger version, outdoors in a walled garden and holds a variety of plants that are arranged, you will notice, symmetrically.

The web is a wonderful thing and has a happy knack of producing what people want. I will be interested to discover whether my blog post triggers a Wikipedia article about plant theatres because it appears that one is needed. I'll check periodically to find out.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 32mm
F No: f8
Shutter Speed: 1/125 sec
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: -0.33 EV
Image Stabilisation: On