Roath Park Nursery

A nursery in Roath Park existed at the extreme south end of the Botanic Garden from the park's early years until the late 1960s. This space is now the green waste area. The 1901 Ordnance Survey map shows a glasshouse and other buildings there, and by 1919 there were four glasshouses shown on the map. On the 1940 map the number of glasshouses had expanded to six, of varying sizes, and by 1954 a rain gauge had been added.

The nursery was essential for provision of floral displays, including the annual Chrysanthemum show, and for producing summer bedding plants for Roath Park and other Cardiff parks. In the 1960s there were three fulltime staff plus an apprentice, much of whose time was spent maintaining the Chrysanthemum collection and producing display material for the periods when the Chrysanthemums were out of season. The nursery foreman was Harry Wilkins.[1]

Roath Park's nursery was closed when Eastern Avenue was built along the former railway line, and approximately half the space was lost to the widening of the embankment. The last Chrysanthemum display was circa 1968. The buildings - mostly wooden sheds - and the glasshouses were all demolished. In the reduced space that was left, there was a standing-out ground with a gravel base for container-grown shrubs. These shrubs were planted in the Rock Garden when the nursery area was finally re-purposed.

Sources of Information

  1. Personal communication (TD)