LOOKING BACK‘
W
ind NE in morning
& all day, changing
in evening to S, dull
all day but mild.
Fruit trees on walls
disbudded, French
beans raised in boxes, planted out & covered
at night with mats to protect from frost.’ So
wrote William Cresswell in his diary for 13 May- Discovered at a f lea market a century later,
it provided such a detailed account of his work
at Audley End House in Essex that it enabled
English Heritage and Garden Organic to restore
the walled kitchen garden to its 19th-century
splendour, when it supplied f lowers, fruit,
vegetables and herbs to the vast Jacobean manor
house. Today, the 2.5-acre plot is as beautiful as it
is productive, with 50 varieties of pear and plum
currently frothy with blossom, and grapevines
that date to its Victorian heyday. Sadly, walled
gardens such as this are now a rarity.
THE FRESHEST FARE
“Until the middle of the last century, every well
established household of any sizeable family
would have had a walled kitchen garden,” says
expert and author Susan Campbell, co-founder
of The Walled Kitchen Garden Network and
vice-president of the Gardens Trust. Most were
established to feed country estates: the residing
family, their visitors and the armies of staff.
They were the original plot-to-plate: trugfuls of
produce delivered to Cook within hours of being
dug up, picked or snipped. The Georgians and
Victorians are to thank for many of our surviving
walled kitchen gardens. According to Campbell,
they were at their most productive between 1800Clockwise from
opposite: A peek
behind the garden wall
at Hartland Abbey,
Devon; beans clamber
up supports in Calke
Abbey’s walled garden;
by the 1950s, scenes
such as this woman
harvesting a glasshouse
melon were becoming
more scarce