Westonbirt Arboretum
Interesting facts
- The Westonbirt Lime in Silk Wood is a ring of stems from one coppiced small-leaved lime, which may be anywhere from 1,000 to over 2,000 years old.
- In 2002 the Tree Council named the Westonbirt Lime one of fifty Great British Trees.
- Coppicing on the site is recorded as early as 1292, and the name 'Weston Birt' first appears in 1309.
- The name joins Weston, an old settlement west of Bowldown Road, with the Bret family, the medieval lords of the manor.
- Blue labels mark Westonbirt's champion trees, the tallest or largest of their kind in Britain; there were 79 of them in 2011.
- Its national collection of Japanese maple cultivars, begun in the early 1980s, holds around 297 different cultivars.
- The five national collections cover maple species, Japanese maple cultivars, bladdernuts, limes and the walnut family, including wingnuts and hickories.
- The arboretum backs onto Highgrove, the country estate of King Charles III.
- From 2003 to 2005 it hosted Britain's first designer-led garden festival, the Westonbirt Festival of the Garden.
- About 22 hectares of hazel coppice under oak standards are still actively cut, and the coppice workers produce charcoal there.
Why it is worth it
Westonbirt, The National Arboretum, is one of the best-known tree collections in Britain. It was begun in 1829 by the landowner Robert Stayner Holford on his estate in the southern Cotswolds, at the height of the Victorian enthusiasm for plant hunting, and his son George Holford carried the planting much further. After George's death in 1926 the estate passed to his nephew, the Earl of Morley; the Holford mansion became a girls' school, and in 1956 the arboretum was handed to the Forestry Commission. Since 2019 it has been run by Forestry England. The landscape is registered Grade I among England's historic parks and gardens.
Today the arboretum spreads across about 600 acres with some 17 miles of paths. Around 15,000 specimens represent roughly 2,500 different kinds of tree and shrub from temperate regions all over the world, and five national tree collections are held here. The site falls into two contrasting halves. The Old Arboretum is the designed Victorian landscape of avenues, glades and specimen trees, many dating back to the 1850s. Silk Wood, across the valley, is older still at heart: a working woodland with records of coppicing going back to the 13th century, into which exotic trees were later planted. Hazel is still coppiced there on a rotation, keeping old woodland crafts alive.
Westonbirt is at its most famous in autumn, when the Japanese maples in the Acer Glade and elsewhere turn scarlet, orange and gold, usually from late September into November; weekends in that season are very busy. A raised Tree Top Walkway lifts visitors into the canopy. Dogs are allowed in Silk Wood but not in the Old Arboretum.
Getting there
The arboretum is on the A433 about 3 miles (5 km) south-west of Tetbury in Gloucestershire; Stroud is about 16 km away. Bristol Airport (BRS) is about 42 km away. The nearest railway station is Kemble, on the line from London Paddington, roughly 20 minutes by taxi; bus 69 runs from Stroud and bus 620 from Bath, and Forestry England offers a discount to visitors who arrive without a car.
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From the encyclopaedia
Westonbirt, The National Arboretum is an arboretum in Gloucestershire, England, about 3 miles (5 km) southwest of the town of Tetbury. Managed by Forestry England, it is perhaps the most important and widely known arboretum in the United Kingdom.
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