Posted hours
An Arboretum That Opens at Eight
Open every day, on somebody's clock, and the clock is the entire arrangement. Turn up ten minutes early and you are standing outside a locked gate with a very good view through it.
The four questions
| Whose ground it is | A trust that owns the collection and the ground, funds it from memberships and a small endowment, and employs the person who unlocks the gate. |
|---|---|
| How far in you get | The whole of the marked collection, the loop and the meadow, between the posted hours. Not the propagation yard, not the glasshouses, not the service track behind them. |
| What it costs to be there | Nothing at the gate on ordinary days. There is a charge on the two weekends a year when something is on, and the board says so. |
| What going wrong looks like | Arriving on the strength of hours you read somewhere else. The gate is locked, the board is right, and there is nobody to appeal to. |
The board outranks everything
We are going to say this once and then repeat it in three other pieces: the hours painted on the board at the gate are the real hours, and every other source is a copy of a copy.
The board changes with the season, sometimes with a week's notice and sometimes with none. The website is updated when somebody remembers. The listing sites are worse and some of them have been wrong for years.
If a place matters to your morning, the only reliable move is to telephone, and the number to call is the one on the board, not the one you found first.
The first hour
Better than the rest of the day, by a distance, and not only because of the light.
Between opening and roughly nine the ground belongs to the people who come every day: two or three walkers on the loop, somebody with a notebook, the person who unlocked the gate now doing something with a hose. Nobody is being shown around. Nothing is being explained.
By eleven it is a different place with a different population and both are worth seeing. We prefer the first one and say so plainly rather than pretending it is a neutral recommendation.
What posted hours do not cover
The hours govern the gate. They do not govern the glasshouses, which open later and close earlier and have their own small sign, and they do not govern the propagation yard, which never opens at all.
This is the ordinary shape of posted ground: one clock on the outer gate and a different clock, or no clock, on everything inside it. Reading the outer board as permission for the whole property is the single most common way to end up somewhere you should not be.
The last twenty minutes
The gate is locked at the posted minute and the person doing it starts at the far end of the loop about twenty minutes before. If you are at the far end when they pass you, you are being politely swept, and the right thing is to walk back with them.
Nobody will be rude about it. They will also not wait.
Practical
- Paths are gravel and one steep section is loose after rain.
- There is a tap and one bench in shade on the whole loop.
- Prams manage the loop and not the meadow spur.
- Dogs are a gate by gate question here and the board answers it.