The Cedar of Lebanon at Blaise Castle

John Scandrett Harford, a wealthy Bristol banker, bought Blaise Castle Estate in 1789 and hired the two biggest names in English landscape design of the era, Humphry Repton and later John Nash, to remake it into a Picturesque parkland. Repton's method favoured framing views with carefully placed specimen trees rather than dense planting, and the Cedars of Lebanon he set out near Blaise Castle House are some of the estate's oldest surviving evidence of that design still growing where he placed it. Cedar of Lebanon was still a relatively novel import to English gardens at the time, prized for its wide, flat-tiered canopy and biblical associations, and a tree planted in Repton's era has now had well over two centuries to develop the broad, layered crown the species is known for. Bristol Corporation bought the estate in 1926, turning Harford's private grounds into a free public park, and the cedar has stood through that entire transition from private landscape statement to a tree thousands of Bristol families walk past on the way to the children's playground nearby.