Burton Constable Arboretum plans
Jack Straker talks about The Constable family's is plans to rejuvenation of the Arboretum at Burton Constable Holiday Park. This arboretum, set up by John Constable from 2006, is partly inspired by the formal gardens of Versailles - but curiously each area is themed after a room or area in the big hall and house. Ie the Chapel Section, with trees from heaven, mirroring the footprint of the family's church. Then the kitchen, with flowering fruit trees. The project marks a 'rejuvenation' for the 30 acre site, with grand plans to inject new life into it, inviting in community groups, schools, villagers etc, as well as revitalising the themed areas with new plants.
Transcript
00:00 I'm Roderica and we are in the Arboretum at Burton Constable Holiday Park.
00:05 So it was established about almost 20 years ago by mum's father, my grandfather,
00:10 who founded the holiday park and the arboretum and who lives on in them both today I suppose.
00:19 Well it's based on the connection with with Burton Constable Hall, which is behind us in
00:26 the very distance you can't see, and each section of the arboretum represents a room in the hall
00:32 or in some cases parts of the estate. For example we're currently in the chapel, which is a section
00:39 reflecting both the chapel in the hall and the family church at Martin, and you can see
00:45 there's various trees which are symbolic of different biblical themes. We've got apple
00:50 trees from Eden, the tree there, the burning bush, holly trees, olive branches like the olive
00:57 leaf after Noah's flood, all sorts of symbolic trees and there's a clump of trees behind us
01:06 which looks like it's not very designed very carefully but actually it's a perfect representation
01:10 of the family church at Martin by scale. You go in and suddenly there's this open space which is
01:16 a to scale version of the church at Martin with different yew trees and lime trees representing
01:22 different parts of the church, so it's a very thought through environment. We have the Chinese
01:27 room with lots of trees from from East Asia, the Nunnumans room which is full of fruit bearing
01:33 trees. The blue room and the gold room are most obvious because they have the coloured
01:40 trees, blue trees and gold trees. It's all a very carefully designed scheme. What we'd love to do is
01:49 to continue Grandpa's vision, I think that's the aim, which is a combination of restoration and
01:57 continuation, so replacing trees that have died through natural wastage either with exact same
02:03 species or with species that are in line with the theme of the room from a certain part of the world
02:09 or with a certain theme. But there's also not just what we do with the arboretum itself, it's
02:18 how we bring people into the arboretum, so we'd love to try and talk about the arboretum more
02:23 broadly and have connections with local schools to do tree identification tours or when the fruits
02:31 from the Nunnumans room ripen we'd like to do jam making sessions and I'm sure that some of
02:37 them will be absolutely disgusting but it'd be quite fun to try out and see what there is.
02:41 When the chestnuts come in to have conker fights and really I think infuse people with a love of
02:48 trees and the natural environment which I don't think we really have anymore.
02:51 He was one of those people who never stopped coming up with ideas and never stopped thinking
02:58 of new schemes, some of which were absolutely crazy to most people but in fact those crazy
03:06 ideas generally speaking have been the most fruitful and the most inspiring and this
03:12 arboretum was seen at the time as being an absolutely madcap idea. Why would you take a
03:18 field full of sheep and make it into an arboretum when you're in your mid-70s where you're never
03:24 going to see a tree come to fruition at all and he said he didn't mind about that because in fact
03:30 it was going to last as all park trees that he'd grown up with that were planted in the 1770s
03:37 he reckoned that in a couple of hundred years those trees that we now see will be there still
03:45 of the majority of them and in some form or another and for him to know that Jack is continuing his
03:51 legacy and planting afresh and refreshing everything that he set about doing is exactly
03:58 as it's meant to be, generation on generation.