Ventnor Botanic Garden
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Ventnor Botanic Garden is botanic garden located in Ventnor, Isle of Wight, United Kingdom. It was founded in 1970 by Sir Harold Hillier and donated to Isle of Wight Council as a public amenity, free to visit except for parking charges.
Its collection comprises worldwide temperate and subtropical trees and shrubs organised by region. These grow in the open air, the location favoured by the moist and sheltered microclimate of the south-facing Undercliff landslip area on the Isle of Wight coast.
The garden is on the site of the Royal National Hospital for Diseases of the Chest, a sanatorium that was established there to exploit the same mild climate. Founded by Arthur Hill Hassall and opened in 1869 as the National Cottage Hospital for Consumption and Diseases of the Chest, it offered 130 separate south-facing bedrooms for its patients. It was closed in 1964 (made obsolete by drug treatment of tuberculosis) and demolished in 1969.[1]
In 1970 the site was initially redeveloped as the Steephill Pleasure Gardens before Sir Harold Hillier's involvement in its more extensive development as a botanical garden. Despite the generally mild weather, plants had to be carefully selected to tolerate the shallow alkaline soil and salt winds, and the garden suffered serious damage in the unusually hard winter of 1986/7 and the major storms of October 1987 and January 1990. The garden is now in the stewardship of Simon Goodenough.
[edit] References
- ^ The Story of the Royal National Hospital Ventnor, EF Laidlaw, Newport, 1990
[edit] External links
- Website with old pictures of the Undercliff of the Isle of Wight
- Ventnor approaches Isle of Wight Historic Postcards page with images of the Royal National Hospital.
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