King admires gardens at Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies
His Majesty visited Oxford on Thursday 17 July to officially open the King Charles III Wing at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, of which he is a patron. The centre was founded in 1985 and is celebrating its 40th year. During the ceremony, the King delivered a brief speech and was given a tour of the gardens, which he had originally inaugurated while still the Prince of Wales.
The University Parks team has been involved with the Islamic Centre since it moved to its current home on Marston Road in 2016. Deborah Wilce, Garden Team Supervisor, and her team, including Carl, Graham, Richard, Katie and two apprentices, Amber and Will, undertook a huge amount of work to prepare the gardens for the special visit.
The King helped to design what was then the Prince of Wales Garden, now the King Charles III Garden. This includes a rose knot garden and a sunken meadow area, based on an Islamic style, with fountains and rills using plants that will survive the British climate.
There are also many smaller gardens and quads around the site that the Parks team maintain and the King was taken on a tour of these with the centre’s director, Farhan Nizami, to see how they had all developed since he opened the building.
The team refreshed what had initially been a service area for the building by re-planting four of the eight raised borders on the North Ramp, and levelling and planting numerous galvanised metal planters around the entrance of the new King Charles III Wing.
Deborah Wilce said “I went to the 40th Anniversary event to represent the Parks team and had a brief conversation with the King about the roses and box hedging. He said he was keen to see how the garden had matured and was glad to see the roses were still in flower”.
“He also shared that he was reluctant to remove all of his box plants because he liked them, but unfortunately had to replace some of them with alternative plants. He explained how he had removed the top of the box hedges or rounded them to get at the caterpillars, as this seemed to reduce their impact. Removing the top of the hedges is something we carried out at OXCIS earlier in the year, as they tend to get very dense with continued cutting over the years. This helps us to either get a chemical spray into the plant for birds to reach the caterpillars, or for gardeners to pick them off.”
The Chancellor and Vice-Chancellor were also in attendance and planted a new tree, Sorbus ulleungensis ‘Olympic Flame’. The King had intended to plant a Sorbus aucuparia, a native rowan tree, but due to time constraints, it will instead be planted in his honour”.
Charles Howard, the Home Bursar at the centre, and Professor Hugh Dickinson from the Department of Biology were both extremely pleased with how well the visit went, and thanked the Parks team for their huge efforts maintaining the gardens over recent weeks.
