The Gardens Today
The gardens cover 11 acres (45,000 m2). Many of the Victorian buildings, including the Nepalese Room, a Roman Temple and the Colonial style pavilion which was originally the Tea Room, still remain. The open air theatre has a backdrop painted by the scenery department at the Welsh National Opera is based on The Funeral of Phocion, a 1648 painting by Nicolas Poussin which is in the National Museum Cardiff. Wide cherry laurel-hedged rides radiate out from the main lawn, leading to woodland beyond. There are displays of camellias, rhododendrons, hydrangeas and eucryphias among the other trees and shrubs. Peacocks and free-flying macaws, neither indigenous to the United Kingdom, roam the gardens.
The woods contain one of the largest discrete areas of semi-natural broad-leaved woodland in southern England, which were managed and exploited for the hazel underwood trades for many centuries, involving coppicing to produce strong, straight hazel wands. A major restoration programme has taken place in the woods over the last ten years, and they are now recognised as a wildlife site of national importance.
The gardens are privately owned and are open on a fee-paying basis from Easter to the end of September each year. True to the spirit of Pitt Rivers, picknickers are encouraged at the gardens, croquet equipment and deckchairs are provided for no charge, and free music is played on Sunday afternoons. The gardens are grant-aided by English Heritage.
Film director Ken Russell first visited the gardens as a child and has used the gardens in a number of his projects over the years, including The Debussy Film (1965) and The Music Lovers (1970).
Read more about this topic: Larmer Tree Gardens
Famous quotes containing the words gardens and/or today:
“Have We not made the earth as a cradle and the mountains as pegs? And We created you in pairs, and We appointed your sleep for a rest; and We appointed night for a garment, and We appointed day for a livelihood. And We have built above you seven strong ones, and We appointed a blazing lamp and have sent down out of the rain-clouds water cascading that We may bring forth thereby grain and plants, and gardens luxuriant.”
—Qur’An. “The Tiding,” 78:6-16, trans. by Arthur J. Arberry (1955)
“The late Président de Montesquieu told me that he knew how to be blind—he had been so for such a long time—but I swear that I do not know how to be deaf: I cannot get used to it, and I am as humiliated and distressed by it today as I was during the first week. No philosophy in the world can palliate deafness.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)