IMAGES TAKEN NEAR TO
Woodside Road, FERNDOWN, BH22 9LB

A small postbox on the corner of Ringwood Road.

Modern bungalows off Ringwood Road.

Modern semi-detached houses off Wimborne Road East.

Cast iron post by the UC road, in parish of FERNDOWN TOWN (EAST DORSET District), Ferdown, 30m East of Monkton Close; 50m East of traffic lights, by the road, on South side of road. Ringwood cast iron post (Trust), erected by the Ringwood, Longham & Leigh turnpike trust in the 19th century. Inscription reads:- : 4 / WIM- / BORNE : : RINGW'D / TRUST : : 5 / RING- / WOOD : Milestone Society National ID: DO_WBRW04

This modern block of flats is just off the A348 at Tricketts Cross just east of Ferndown.

This large, Elizabeth II-reign postbox is roughly halfway along Victoria Road, up which we look towards the town centre. It is emptied finally at 5:30 on weekday evenings and at 12:30 on Saturday lunchtimes.

At first sight this is a most uninteresting view. However, this simple, yet elegant wall, which is well over a century old, is all that is left of a once vast enterprise of importance not only in the history of Ferndown (now the largest non-coastal community in Dorset), but also of seminal importance to national horticulture. In 1859, the brothers William and David Stewart, the young heirs to a long-established Scottish plant nursery enterprise, decided to look to southern England for a milder base to extend their operations. They purchased a large expanse of land just south of West Moors (Dorset), north of the Wimborne to Ringwood road. The growing nursery helped encourage the development of Ferndown - indeed it was the Stewart brothers who decided to merge the original name (Fern Down). David Stewart built a large house on the site - Ferndown Hill House - and this wall surrounded that property. When the house was demolished (I believe in the 1970s) the wall and main gate to the property were retained.

This is the old gateway to Ferndown Hill House on Wimborne Road (East), Ferndown - the family home of the Stewart family. The nursery on this site has two claims to national fame: in 1955, they opened the first garden centre in the UK on this site - just a little way to the west of the family house. And in the same decade, as the firm relocated to a fresh site at Broomhill, near Wimborne Minster, the Stewarts introduced container-grown stock to the British horticultural industry, revolutionising production and sales. As can be seen, the gateway has been bricked up. Behind the wall now lies an estate of houses – the wall is all that is left on this once great enterprise, though Stewart's Nursery still trades at Broomhill and elsewhere.