131 acre garden. Private inner broad. 950 year old oak tree. Wild and cultivated flowers and shrubs. Birds, butterflies and dragon flies. 3 miles of wonderful woodland walks. Boat trips.

The Fairhaven Woodland and Water Garden comprises 53 hectares (131 acres) of beautiful ancient woodland, water gardens and a private broad at South Walsham in the heart of the Norfolk Broads.

The garden was left in trust by the 2nd Lord Fairhaven in 1973, and was opened to the public in 1975. We work hard to preserve and enhance the garden according to Lord Fairhaven’s wishes.

The garden is renowned for its fabulous collection of candelabra primulas – the best naturalised collection in the UK – see them in May.

It is also well known for magnificent Autumn Colours in late October and early November. Whatever the season, Fairhaven offers a great stress-busting experience.

We are open every day of the year except Christmas Day, so there are plenty of opportunities to get away from it all and explore our wonderful woodland walks.

Directions:

9 miles east of Norwich off the A47 at junction with B1140

Sustainability:

Recycling at Fairhaven:

We compost all our leaves from the trees and turn it to leaf mould which is then sold as an organic fertiliser.
We use a ground source heat pump to heat our new tea room and rain water harvesters to water our plants and flush the toilets.
We recycle all our paper from the office and everything else that can be recycled including cans and some plastic.
Our hand towels in the toilets are made from 100% locally recovered waste paper.

Green Tourism Business Award:

Our new Tearoom was imported from Finland and has been made using wood from sustainable forests.

The whole Tearoom arrived on one lorry and was put in place using a large crane—it only took four hours!

To heat our new Tearoom and provide the kitchen with all the hot water it needs we have installed a Ground Source Heat pump. 500 metres of pipe work has been placed 2 metres deep in our car park to collect the heat generated by the earth.

Using drinking water to flush our toilets is a huge waste so we have installed two 6,500 litre rain water harvesting tanks which will provide all the water we need to flush our new toilets and water our plant sales area.

This is just a small number of Green ideas we have incorporated into our new Tearoom. Why not call in for a ‘Green Tea’ and see some of our other ideas?

Perhaps you can think of a few new ones for us!

Gaining a Silver award for Green Tourism made us think about how we could use more Green technologies in our new Tearoom—this year we are aiming for Gold.

We have also won the Business Waste, best practice category in The Norfolk Waste Partnership awards ceremony presented at County Hall on Monday 26 January 2009.

Facilities: