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The Nature of Oxford
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NATURE GROWS ON STONE
Exeter College is small but it is
filled with life, producing much more in regards to nature than I expected.
Although it is impossible to miss the opposing wall draped in ivy as you walk
through the front gate I found much more than the obvious. As I walked around
the Front Quad looking at the ivy on the wall, I thought to myself “the
college is nature.” This initial idea led me to look more closely at the
college’s greenery to gain some further evidence on this idea.
  
It was this first impression of nature being so closely
connected to nature that compelled me to seek out the more unobvious nature
at Exeter. After looking
around I found leaves of ivy all over the college that had the same basic
shape of the window tracery. Although these leaves might not have been the
template from which this college’s architecture was created, I felt that Exeter could be
unintentional case of art mimicking nature.
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“the college is nature”
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FELLOWS GARDEN
Having what I have deemed successfully
identifying multiple elements of nature around the college with their stone
relatives and feeling quite clever I move to the Fellow’s Garden. The Fellows   Garden is quite a retreat.
Although Exeter lacks the space
that New College had it also has a
small mound like hill that can serve as a good sightseeing spot of Radcliffe Square up on the heights
of the College’s wall. Although Exeter does not have the
expansive Garden that Trinity and New College do there is a wide
variety of nature with different kinds of ivy, trees, lawns, flowers, shrubs,
and even water. Exeter College reminds me of a
poem, in that it is not only beautiful to read but also has an underlying
system that deserves to be explicated.
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Fellows
Garden
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