Nuneham Courtney - Harcourt Arboretum

A site featuring Giant Sequoia, Coast Redwood, Dawn Redwood. Verified occurrence recorded by Redwood World. Walking into the Harcourt Arboretum and standing amongst the collection of huge trees, one could be forgiven for feeling that one might have wandered into a forest of prehistoric Giants. The varied trees in this part of the Arboretum were nearly all planted over a hundred years ago and this certainly shows in their size. The biggest of all by far, of course, are the Giant Redwoods, closely followed by a Coast Redwood with a girth of 5.55m! Also worthy of note is the enourmous Monkey Puzzle tree, whose trunk typically has the look of an elephant's leg. Although they were certainly not over-crowded, their closeness meant that it was difficult to take full photographs that would do justice to these marvellous examples of Redwood trees. Harcourt Arboretum is part of the University of Oxford and is home to ten Giant and six Coast Redwoods. Five of the Coast Redwoods are young examples that were planted in 1992 and can be found growing in the Acer Glade. Harcourt run a free school education programme, and during the visit an employee of the Arboretum was measuring one of the trees ready for a school visit the next day. The children were to be making their very own tree measuring devices from paper and a plumb line, and she was testing an example in readiness. Sadly, the tree that would have been largest has suffered a lightning strike, and as can be seen from the photograph, has had the top cut away cleanly and roped back together. It will be interesting to see how it fares as it throws up new main stems from the existing branches.

Redwood species here

Sources

• Visit Harcourt Arboretum | Oxford Botanic Garden and Arboretumofficialobga.ox.ac.uk