THE GARDEN TODAY
The revival of the Old Deanery Garden has been taken up by a group of local volunteers. The aim is not to reconstruct the garden of William Turner's time, because there is no evidence of what that looked like. Instead, it includes plants Turner mentioned in his writings.
Features are being introduced which reflect the kind of garden he would have recognised, such as the Tudor-style path layout and the four great terracotta pots of characteristic 1500s shape.
One of the Chequer beds
The Chequer Beds flanking the porch, and marked out with stone setts, contain medicinal plants mentioned by Turner. For the "windy colic" he prescribed a herbal bath of germander, thyme, saxifrage, mallow, hollyhock, hyssop, balm, feverfew and horehound all boiled up, added to 2 or 3 gallons of cows' milk, and topped up with water as hot as the patient could bear. He recommended hart's tongue fern "against the bytings of serpents" and clove pinks "for the bytynge of a madd dogge". Plant List >>
The Little Orchard contains period fruit trees – black mulberry, early apple trees, a medlar, a quince, and a perry pear. "We have many kyndes of gardin Peares with us in Englande", Turner wrote. The orchard is underplanted with spring bulbs. Plant List >>
The Rampart Walk, with seat and spectacular view of Wells Cathedral West Front, is currently under development and is taking shape.
The Little Orchard
The Gunthorpe Bed where ferns mentioned by Turner grow in the shade of Dean Gunthorpe's great hall, and a new bed at this end of the garden is devoted to plants listed by Turner that were used in cloth-making and dyeing. Plant List >>
The autumn flowering cyclamen, which Turner calls 'Sowesbrede', form a spreading carpet under the great beech tree and are spectacular in season.
The revival of the Old Deanery Garden is an ongoing project. A garden existed here 400 years before William Turner, 'the Father of English Botany'. It is still here 400 years after him.
The Italian Courtyard
William Turner left England abruptly in 1541, having finished his studies at Cambridge. He was dissatisfied with the lack of scientific botanical teaching in England, out of step with the church authorities, in trouble for preaching without a licence, and had just got married when, as a deacon, he was supposed to remain celibate. He travelled to Italy, hub of the Renaissance and the ‘new learning’, where the universities of Bologna and Ferrara were the leading centres for the teaching of botanical science and medicine. For about a year, 1541-1542, Turner studied under the renowned teacher Luca Ghini at Bologna, whom he describes as “Lucas Gynus ... in Bonony my maister”, and also with Antonio Musa Brasavola at Ferrara. He qualified as a doctor of medicine. It was doubtless during his time in Italy that he developed his fine italic handwriting. In his later plant books he often mentions plants that grow in Italy. He describes cyclamen and many other plants he found on “Mount Appenine beside Bonony” – the Appenines to the west of Bologna. He saw wild hops growing on the roadside between Chertosa and Pavia, asparagus “only in the Mount Appenine”, capers “in diverse gardens of Italy” and “Ryse growing in plenty” up the valley of the R.Po. He writes of pistachio nuts, “I have sene them in Bononi growing upon theyr tre”, and “I have sene diverse Pomgranat trees with fruite growyng upon them in Italy.” Of cotton, “I never sawe it growing saving onely in Bonony”. He always emphasises that he has actually seen the plants himself; this is not second-hand information. He also visited Padua, Cremona, Como, Milan and Venice. In 1543 he headed back north of the Alps and in 1547, with Edward VI on the throne and the new Protestant Church of England taking shape, he returned to England with his wife Jane and their baby son. He may have taken seeds with him, for he describes snapdragon “have I in my gardine whose seeds came from Italy”.This courtyard, arranged with the symmetry that characterised Italian formal gardens of the period, contains plants Turner mentions as having seen in Italy