The Plantation Garden is a restored Victorian town garden located off

Earlham Road Earlham Road (the B1108) is a road in Norwich, England, linking the city centre to the area of Earlham to the west of the city and the Norwich southern bypass ( A47) beyond. Details The road formerly marked the northern limit of the Golden ...

Norwich Norwich () is a cathedral city and district of Norfolk, England, of which it is the county town. Norwich is by the River Wensum, about north-east of London, north of Ipswich and east of Peterborough. As the seat of the See of Norwich, with ...

Norfolk Norfolk () is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan county in East Anglia in England. It borders Lincolnshire to the north-west, Cambridgeshire to the west and south-west, and Suffolk to the south. Its northern and eastern boundaries are the No ...

. , visitors are asked to pay £2 to visit the garden, which is open daily throughout the year.

The garden

The Plantation Garden is a restored Victorian town garden, maintained by volunteers, located in a former

chalk Chalk is a soft, white, porous, sedimentary carbonate rock. It is a form of limestone composed of the mineral calcite and originally formed deep under the sea by the compression of microscopic plankton that had settled to the sea floor. Ch ...

quarry in

. It includes a '

Gothic Gothic or Gothics may refer to: People and languages *Goths or Gothic people, the ethnonym of a group of East Germanic tribes **Gothic language, an extinct East Germanic language spoken by the Goths **Crimean Gothic, the Gothic language spoken b ...

' fountain, flower beds, lawns, woodland walkways, rustic bridge,

Italianate The Italianate style was a distinct 19th-century phase in the history of Classical architecture. Like Palladianism and Neoclassicism, the Italianate style drew its inspiration from the models and architectural vocabulary of 16th-century Italian ...

terrace, ‘Medieval’ terrace wall; and hundreds of architectural details fashionable in the mid 19th century. This idiosyncratic creation was described by ''The Telegraph'' as "a tycoon's folly".

History

The garden, located on

, was established 140 years ago in a abandoned quarry by Henry Trevor, a Norwich shopkeeper. Over a period of 40 years, the gardens became a showpiece that featured terraces, water features and rockeries surrounded by a large fountain, all styled on Italian Renaissance designs. It once featured eight glasshouses. The design may have been influenced by the architect

Edward Boardman Edward Boardman (1833–1910) was a Norwich born architect. He succeeded John Brown as the most successful Norwich architect in the second half of the 19th century.Roy Strong Sir Roy Colin Strong, (born 23 August 1935) is an English art historian, museum curator, writer, broadcaster and landscape designer. He has served as director of both the National Portrait Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. ...

is a patron of the trust. In April 2016, the garden was forced to close as a result of structural damage to the terrace wall, following the collapse of an old mining tunnel in Earlham Road. The garden reopened on 23 April 2016. After three

sinkholes A sinkhole is a depression or hole in the ground caused by some form of collapse of the surface layer. The term is sometimes used to refer to doline, enclosed depressions that are locally also known as ''vrtače'' and shakeholes, and to openi ...

opened up near the garden,

Norwich City Council Norwich City Council is the city council for the city of Norwich, Norfolk, England. It consists of 39 councillors, elected to represent 13 wards, each with three councillors. It is currently under Labour control and led by Alan Waters. It for ...

arranged to carry out underground probing work at the site, which was planned for 31 January 2017. Entrances to the garden were sealed off on 28 January. After further safety tests the garden reopened to the public on 15 March 2017.

References

Sources

* *

External links

The Plantation Garden website
from Tour Norfolk {{Parks and open spaces in Norwich Parks and open spaces in Norwich Gardens in Norfolk