The Harris Garden
School of Biological Sciences, The University of Reading

The Harris Garden provides an important teaching and research facility for the School of Biological Sciences as well as giving pleasure, to an increasing number of visitors.

The garden is part of the Whiteknights Campus of the University and is set in what was originally the home paddock of "The Wilderness", a Victorian house (now demolished) built in the remains of a famous landscape garden created at White Knights by George, Marquis of Blandford (later 5th Duke of Marlborough) between 1798 and 1819,

A botanic garden with adjacent experimental grounds was established by the University in 1972 when the Department of Botany moved from London Road to Whiteknights. In 1987 the Department of Horticulture and Landscape moved from Shinfield to join with Agricultural Botany and Botany in a new School of Biological Sciences. The garden was redesigned by Richard Bisgrove of the Centre for Horticulture and Landscape in Biological Sciences and in 1988, work began on the redevelopment of the Botanic Garden to meet the wider teaching and research requirements of the new School.

The garden occupies about 12 acres (5 ha.). In recognition of its new, wider role, the former Botanic Garden has been re-named the Harris Garden in memory of the late Professor Tom Harris, a distinguished palaeo-botanist at Reading University and renowned gardener.

Despite two major storms, a drought and a plague of rabbits in its brief history (and the wettest winter for 250 years), substantial progress has been made since work on the Harris Garden began.

Main Features

The Large Bank to the right of the entrance was created to screen the adjacent buildings from view. It is planted primarily with shrubs, many of Mediterranean origin, exploiting the bank's southern aspect and good drainage.
The Annual Border is the square border on your left as you enter the garden. It contains a varied collection of hardy and half-hardy annuals. This is primarily a teaching project for the horticulture students who sow the hardy annuals in early May; the half-hardies are raised under glass and planted out in early June. Other annuals are included in the Formal Gardens near the centre of the Harris Garden.
The Winter Garden is near the entrance so it can be enjoyed even in inclement weather, and contains a wide range of plants of interest between November and March. Winter flowering shrubs, herbaceous plants and bulbs, plants with particularly good winter foliage or attractive form, and plants with attractive bark or particularly persistent fruits all have a place here. The fact that many winter flowering plants have delightful scent is an additional bonus. Although this is primarily a winter garden, care has been taken in the planning to ensure that it will provide summer interest too. Many plants with attractive bark or winter flowers are also excellent summer foliage plants, and some of the good winter foliage plants flower in summer.
The Green Border to the right of the main path continues the theme of good foliage (including much of winter interest). It contains mainly shrubs arranged to show the diversity of foliage texture and wide range of greens. Most flowers in the border are white to create a cool green division between the colourful entrance gardens and the more informal and naturalistic landscape beyond. The background of ultimately large evergreens has made an effective screen from the experimental grounds and some will be pruned each year to keep the border in scale with its setting. Smaller ferns, hostas, grasses and other herbaceous plants are being added year by year.
The Orchard, to the left of the path opposite the second half of the Green Border, contains a collection of ornamental crab-apples, including both vigorous and smaller-growing cultivars with single and double flowers in colours ranging from white to deep pink. The crab apple collection was the first gift to the new garden from the Friends of the Harris Garden. In addition to prolific spring blossom, many of the trees also have good autumn foliage and colourful fruits. These two seasons of interest are being echoed beneath the trees with bulbs and wild flowers. Cowslips and ox-eye daisies planted when the Orchard was established have produced numerous seedlings, while drifts of snowdrops, scillas, crocus, narcissus and snakes head fritillary provide a charming tapestry from January to late April.
The Pond, lined with polythene and with an artificial water supply, was a feature of the earlier Botanic Garden but after fifteen years of service, the polythene started to leak badly. The liner was replaced in 1995, another gift from the Friends, taking the opportunity to enlarge and re-shape the pond in order to create a larger water surface nearer the path. Soil excavated from the enlarged pond was used to fill a depression on the other side of the path and this area has been sown with a wild flower seed mix.
The Stream is a new feature in the garden and running water adds a new dimension to the garden. The pump and associated work for this new feature were financed by the Friends in 2000/01.
New Wood, on the other side of the main path, in the centre of the Harris Garden, consists of three rectangular blocks of young, mainly native trees. These were planted in 1989/90, initially as an experiment to study establishment of young trees and of woodland flora beneath new plantations. As the trees grow, they will offer scope for carefully thinning and coppicing to create irregular copses framing long views through the garden. Planted as knee-high transplants, the trees are now making a real contribution to the structure of the garden.
Although the planting of New Wood has reduced the area of grass in the garden, it is gradually making the garden seem larger, providing a more human scale and more variety of scene by creating a degree of enclosure and direction. The wood, with its glades, clearings and smoother lawns will be managed to produce a variety of habitats for wild flowers, butterflies and other wildlife, beginning with the small area of meadow mentioned above.
The Cornfield is a new feature of the garden, planned by second-year Landscape Management students. The ground has been ploughed and sown with cornfield annuals, but in a strongly geometric pattern rather than in a naturalistic mixture. The design is such that each species is next to every other species so we will be able to monitor their spread for a year or two. When this initial experiment is complete we may continue to manage it as a cornfield - perhaps even with com - or use the space for another scheme.
The Cherry Bowl was planted in April 1995. The collection of Japanese flowering cherries is arranged around a circular clearing which has been planted with bulbs chosen to coincide with the cherry blossom. As with the crab-apple orchard, the cherries have been selected to demonstrate the range of flower variation in the group, with the bonus of colourful autumn foliage. The rough ground around the trees was cultivated, levelled and re-sown to create a low. wild flower meadow bordering a smooth grass path.
The Walled Garden has been used for a variety of purposes in recent years but it is now being developed as a traditional walled garden with fruit, vegetables, herbs and flower borders arranged about the central dipping pond and cross paths. The wall fruit are now wen established and the herb garden, modelled on the pattern of a Roman mosaic, is taking shape. Hyssop was used for the hedges for the first few years (it is easily and cheaply raised from seed) but it has now been replaced by Buxus sempervirens 'Suffruticosa' (Box). A rondel of timber posts in the centre of the walled garden has been planted with climbing roses and clematis. Other parts of the walled garden provide nursery space, including a rose root-stock area for rose budding practices for horticultural students.
Returning towards the main gate along the outer edge of the garden. The Demonstration Garden is situated in the most open part of the site, away from shade and tree rools. It includes a range of features used primarily for undergraduate teaching, such as collections of vegetables and a small fruit garden. A collection of different hedges around the fence is being added to each year to integrate the Demonstration Garden into its less formal surroundings.
The Formal Gardens, enclosed within hedges of beech and yew, continue the straight lines of the Demonstration Garden. The hedges, planted in the winter of 1990/91, surround compartments of varying scale and proportion, useful in the teaching of garden design. The square garden is used for formal bedding: in its first season the impatiens in the beds were nearly as tall as the hedges, but this changed dramatically within a decade! The Rose Garden was planted in autumn 1991 and rapidly became a mature feature of the garden. It contains more than fifty cultivars of roses arranged in a colour sequence from red through pink and white to yellow, apricot and orange. Between the square and the rose garden are double borders which accommodate the dahlia collection and annual borders for butterflies and similar themes. A major feature of the formal gardens is the re-creation of Gertrude Jekyll's famous flower border at Munstead Wood, illustrating her ideas on colour planning. At the northern end of (the Jekyll border, near the large Turkey oaks, the bed of paeony species was planted in May 1995.
The Gold Border at the southern end of the Jekyll Border was planted in 1998 and is maturing rapidly. It was extended In 2003.
The Woodland Garden along the roadside boundary is where planting of the University's botanic garden began in the 1970s. Among the drifts of bluebell, wood anemone, celandine and other native woodland plants there are beds devoted to North American and Himalayan plants, bamboos and Ericaceous plants. In the small valley adjacent to the road (and visible from it for the sake of passers-by), the original planting had become weed-infested and overgrown. It has now been replanted as a "Jungle Garden", using bamboos, palms and other bold plants to create an exotic atmosphere. Much of the planting is more-or-less hardy in the Reading area but the Jungle Garden also accommodates many tender plants traditionally used in "sub-tropical gardening".
Conifer Circle. A circle of Lawson's Cypress forms and similar conifers was planted in 2002. We look forward to seeing this planting mature. It contains over twenty forms of this most variable of conifers arranged in a sequence from grey to green to yellow foliage.
The Heather Garden occupies an irregular triangle between the Formal Gardens, the large 19th century Turkey oaks and the meadow. Island beds of heaths, dwarf pines and other appropriate plants thus lead naturally from the colourful exotics of the Formal Gardens to the wider expanses of lawn, wild-flower meadows and woodland. Most of the heathers were planted in Spring 1991.
The Mixed Border, more than 130 metres (420ft) long, separates the Harris Garden from the Experimental Grounds. Its western end has been recently replanted as part of the general renewal programme. The eastern end was replanted in Spring 1993 with a collection of nearly fifty shrub roses, ancient and modem. The backdrop of roses and other shrubs, with irregular bays for herbaceous plants, bulbs and occasional annuals will gradually be woven into a truly mixed border. Even now, the border provides a long season of interest, leading visitors from the Woodland, Formal and Heather Gardens, past the Turkey oaks which frame long views across the garden, and hence back to the Orchard and Entrance Garden.