Morpeth Attractions

Venue: Carlisle Park    When: Daily

The William Turner Garden in Morpeth's splendid Carlisle Park celebrates the "father of English botany." Nestled on the south bank of the River Wansbeck, this modern-take on a medieval knot and physic garden includes herbs and boxed hedges as well as plants that would have been introduced in Elizabethan times.

As part of the major National Lottery-funded refurbishment of Carlisle Park for the new millennium, Morpeth saluted its famous botanical son, creating the garden in the style of herb gardens of Turner's day, with period wood structures, arches, gateways, gazebo and even an aviary.

The garden stands by the formal entrance of Carlisle Park and utilises local materials - sandstone, granite and whinstone as well as oak; accurately replicated in the smaller version that wowed visitors to the 2004 Chelsea Flower Show.

William Turner was born in Morpeth around 1508 and studied in Cambridge, where he already published a Libellus de re herbaria (Little Book of Herbs). Embracing the reformation (and being arrested for it), he then went to Italy to study medicine, becoming a doctor in 1542. Returning to Britain, he became both chaplain and physician to the Duke of Somerset, later taking up posts at both York and Wells Cathedral. He was Dean of Wells Cathedral twice, from 1551 to 1553 and again from 1560 to 1564.

The first volume of his three-part A New Herball ("wherin are conteyned the names of herbes") was published in 1551 (following on from his 1548 The Names of Herbes), for the first time in the vernacular naming of some 300 native plant species, including their "uses and vertues."

The second volume was published in 1562 with the third, including revisions of the first two, appeared shortly before his death in 1568, the year that also saw the publication of Turner's New Boke on the Natures and Properties of all Wines!