University Parks gardeners restore Museum lawn
In late 2024, a team of gardeners from the University Parks re-laid the turf on the lawn in front of the Museum of Natural History on Parks Road.
The lawn had been damaged during the protest encampment over the summer. The team worked for three weeks, removing more than 160 tonnes of old turf and spent earth, and bringing in 200 tonnes of fresh topsoil to replace it. They carefully levelled and graded the surface, and then laid some 2,000m2 of new turf. In the process they also moved one of the cast dinosaur footprints to a location that more accurately reflects how the animal is thought to have walked.
The project has transformed the lawn, and by next year once the turf has had time to settle in, it will be in its finest condition for many years. You can see some photos of work in progress in this video:
https://www.youtube.com/embed/wn0GDNlUyZ8?si=ohM2tMC8itzIL6N7
The lawn work coincided with work to strengthen and protect the giant redwood (Sequoiadendron gigangeum) tree on the lawn. The Parks arboricultural team had been planning these protective works for two years alongside colleagues in Heritage & Building Maintenance (HBM). After contractors carried out an aerial survey to assess the tree’s health, they undertook a variety of jobs including cutting away dead wood, removing tarmac that was covering some of the tree’s root area, carefully digging out weeds and turf around its base, and adding mulch to improve the soil and encourage more air and water to circulate around its root system.
New cast iron railings designed by HBM colleagues completed the job of smartening up the area around the tree. This also added 2m in each direction to the area that is protected from being compacted by passers-by – many years of of feet can do a surprising amount to squash all the air gaps out of soil, making it much less hospitable for tree roots. The team also added a lightning rod using a 57m mobile working platform, having realised that as the tallest object in central Oxford, the tree was at significant risk of a lightning strike that would almost certainly kill it.
Above you can see an historic image of the tree earlier in its life. As you can see, the Sequoiadendron is one of three that were planted when the museum was built in the 1860s; its fellows died earlier but this one has become one of Oxford’s tallest and most iconic trees. Below there is also a scan of the 1861 receipt from William Baxter, Curator of the Oxford Botanic Garden, for the £15 payment he received for overseeing the planting of the three trees. These images were provided by the Oxford University Archives, and are published with their kind permission.
