Bryan Hewitt on the Rock Garden restoration work

Narrator:

The Rock Garden is built on a steep clay bank that was originally constructed by Sir Hugh Myddelton, the founder of the New River. The bank shored up the river as it looped round and flowed through the garden. Bryan Hewitt is involved with the rock garden’s restoration:

Bryan Hewitt:

The paths have been the first part of that restoration. Establishing where the paths were from the Kentish ragstone edging as a guide and then they will be restored with hogging hopefully…, as a surface to walk on.

Excavations revealed the true shape of the ponds that were …down there. … The large one was clay-lined – and then that flowed into a concrete-lined … pond…And then that would overflow into a lead-lined pond. … And a treefrog he brought back from one of his foreign trips was released there and he used to love to sit on the edge of the pond and it could be identified, when it couldn’t be seen, by it’s distinctive croak. It was there for a good couple of years before it disappeared.

So these are features we hope to eventually restore and get going again. But they were fed from a naturally occurring spring in the middle of … the alpine meadow, which has since dried up we believe. So maybe water will have to be artificially bought down there to restore that aspect.