Visit to Holland by
students from Cannington.
Students
who enrol on the horticulture and arboriculture courses at Cannington are given
the opportunity to travel abroad on an annual study tour during which the
professional and industrial practices of the country they are visiting can be
investigated and compared and contrasted with those practised in the United
Kingdom. Students can, for example, see
how horticultural problems can be overcome on a range of soils, in different
climates, and caused by the local fauna. The Trust supported with a grant of £1000 a visit to Holland by 35
students.
On
19th April the group travelled by ferry from Dover to Calais and
then drove across France into Belgium and then Holland and stayed at Nordvick
on the coast of the North Sea.
The
first visit on Sunday 20th April was to the Utrecht Botanic which
were built in the grounds of an old fort that dated back to the 19th Century. This was particularly
interesting as the area on which the gardens are built is very flat, and any raised ground had to be imported from
elsewhere, so 300, 000 tonnes of stone and soil had been imported from Belgium
in order to create a large rockery area. Much of the construction techniques
and planting was innovative. Recycled old paving slabs were used to provide an
environment for alpine plantings On the way back the coach drove through the
large nursery stock growing area of Boskoop, an area of major economic
importance to the Dutch horticulture industry, with miles of tree and shrub
production, much of it made up of small family units, but producing large
quantities of plants to a very high standard. Interesting training techniques (pleaching and
semi-bonsai pruning) were being used, not just in the nurseries, but generally
throughout private gardens and public parks. The Dutch attitude towards nature
is that:- ‘This is something that we have to tame and use as we see fit’ in
contrast to the British approach of
enjoying the natural form of plants.
The
following day, the 21st, started with a visit to the Keukenhof Gardens where about 7,000,000 bulbs are planted
within the gardens. The Group spent the day enjoying the grounds. There were
views of the surrounding growing areas where further millions of bulbs are
produced for sale. The gardens are
populated with lots of Great Crested Grebes and, more exotically, Green
Parakeets, which appear to have naturalised.
On
the 22nd April some of the party went to Aalsmeer flower auction
whilst the arboricultural students toured Amsterdam on pushbikes to study the
trees. A great number and variety of species of elm tree are still growing in
Amsterdam. The City Tree Officer, who was guiding the Group said that they
still had about 7,000 elm trees of many different species. Dutch Elm Disease
was an irritation, but not a major issue and the City managed to keep on top of
it and had only lost a few trees through that disease. The Dutch appear to have such a regard for
the enhancement of the environment by trees that vandalism, the Tree Officer
said, was not an issue.
On
the final day the Group drove to the Trompenberg Arboretum, near Rotterdam.
This very attractive area is closer to the type of garden that can be seen in
Britain. Plants were broadly speaking,
allowed to grow naturally and an importance was placed on the grouping of
plants and how they were arranged.
Adapted
by Anthony Pugh Thomas from a longer report by Clive Stanley, one of the
leaders of the 2008 visit.