Blog

Next week, Tree Team supervisor Rich Townsend, RBG Wakehurst Place arborist Jon Harmer and I are jetting off to the United States on a rather exciting mission.

If you have ventured into Silk Wood recently you may well have noticed our Tree Team hard at work in Maple Loop, which is an area was that was once a forest research plot packed full of hybrid larch trees.

The Welcome Building has been open nearly two months now and is beginning to feel like it’s always been here.

Over the last six months I have been piloting new activities in care homes and community day care centres around the local counties.

With their handpicked market stalls of local producers, there will be lots of exciting food to take home with you and some will be cooking and selling some mouth watering food throughout the day for you to eat.

Following some very impressive thunder and lightning overnight, I ventured out into the Old Arboretum at first thing on Friday morning (18th July 2014) to check for any damage.

It’s been a very busy few weeks. Rich Bullock our site manager from Speller Metcalfe, has been working around the clock to complete the building so the Westonbirt team can start fitting out furniture and testing the new building.

Well, there is still plenty of spring colour to enjoy here at Westonbirt and the flowers will keep coming through the summer, though not in the abundance we are spoilt with in spring.

Looking good out in the arboretum today are over 15,000 trees, though perhaps some more obviously than others.

Ha Ha. An expression often used to represent laughter. However a ha-ha is also a landscape design feature that creates a barrier to things such as livestock, while preserving uninterrupted views.

Among the many attributes of members of the Enkianthus genus are the bell-like flowers.

I have chosen to highlight this one this week as our largest, oldest specimen (close to Main Drive and Loop Walk in the Old Arboretum) is looking quite fine in bract right about now.

The role of the Community Inclusion team is to enable a greater number of people, from under-represented groups, to experience the arboretum and to ‘connect with trees’.

There is far too much excitement amongst the plants to attempt to mention it all here, so I shall stick to just the one today.

The Welcome Building has been changing dramatically over a very short space of time and will continue to do so in the coming weeks.