Busy at Balmoral - Our Historic Landscape

20 May 2006

I’ve never been involved in anything quite like this before. Three months preparing, two months growing plants and a few late nights building the stand culminated in the Environment & Heritage Service (EHS) Built Heritage stand at the Balmoral Show 2006.

EHS came up with the idea of trying to show the public how our landscape has changed, due to human interaction, over the millennia. The way they decided to do this was with a timeline - you walked into their 25m long stand in the year 1,800BC and left in the 21st Century. In between, you visited 700AD (early Christian), 1500 (late medieval), 1740 (early Georgian) and 1860 (mid-Victorian) times.

At each ‘station’, a large wall panel depicted a ‘typical’ landscape (from what later became Northern Ireland) with features that would have been present at the time. As time progressed, you could witness how people adapted or abandoned earlier buildings, monuments, settlements or landscape features. There was even an archaeological dig in the 2,000AD panel unearthing remains that were in full use in earlier panels.

Alongside the settlement and architectural changes, people also made changes to the plantlife in our landscape. Trees were removed, agricultural crops and animals were introduced, estates grew, famine came and went and explorers introduced plants from all over the world. Conservation Volunteers’ role, because of its knowledge of plants coming from our Tree and Wildflower Nurseries, was to show (in just a dozen or so square metres!) how the plants in our landscape have changed.

The Prehistoric and Early Christian eras provided no real problem, native plants are our speciality, but much research was needed to ensure we put appropriate plants into the later areas. Barbara Pilcher, from Lisdoonan Herbs, supplied early Christian herbs and vegetables and late medieval medicinal herbs. We created a young hawthorn hedge in between this and the early Georgian area to represent the enclosure of fields. Early Georgian was represented by a formal parterre bed consisting of gravel, grass and topiary (yew, Taxus baccata, and box, Buxus sempervirens). The challenge here was fitting a landscape, often covering a few acres, into an area 2m x 1m! The mid-Victorian area was filled with a wide variety of introduced plants inculding ferns, lavender cotton (Santolina chamaecyparissus), cabbage palm (Cordyline australis) and elephant’s ears (Bergenia cordifolia) to name but a few!

The overall effect of all these plants and information panels, the demonstrations of hazel house-building, stone masonry, grinding grain with a quernstone, a lime kiln and recreated stone archways, and three days of glorious spring sunshine was fantastic. I think all who commented on the stand only had positive things to say about it and, we hope, people went away understanding a little bit more about what makes up our landscape!

The only downside to the whole event was returning on a rainy Monday morning to sadly take the stand down to find that someone had helped themselves to a number of plants without asking! That aside, the whole experience was a wonderful one and, perhaps, not the last.