The traditional garden would be enclosed by high walls, with possibly an orchard alongside. It would have hothouses capable of supplying its owner with figs, grapes, peaches, melons and nectarines, as well as forced vegetables and exotic pot plants. Gardens like this were the rule, rather than the exception in all proper country establishments before the Second World War.

Susan Campbell, Cottesbrooke, An English Kitchen Garden

Time was when everything we ate was home-grown or grown reasonably locally and when virtually every cottage and every country house had its own kitchen garden, often one enclosed by high walls for horticultural rather than security purposes, although it is thought that some gardens might originally have been enclosed for the protection from animal or human intruders.

But when did we start to contain our kitchen gardens within walls? In Tudor and Jacobean times, the kitchen gardens of the prosperous merchant classes were not hidden away but were usually in front of the house – although sometimes screened behind hedges – with vegetables on one side of the gravel path and fruit on the other. Indeed, right up to the 18th century, the best situation for the kitchen garden – walled or not – was considered to be close to the house.

Then along came Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, leader of the landscape garden movement. Walled gardens didn’t quite fit in with his idea of enforced ‘naturalism’; they were detrimental to the view from the house. According to historian Jenny Uglow, “he would move the whole unsightly rectangle, with its water butts and sheds, half a mile or so away, screening it with trees and laying a gravelled ‘service road’ to take the produce to the house in carts and wheelbarrows.” Garden historian, Susan Campbell says, “on larger estates, the kitchen garden might be relocated as much as a mile or more away, where it would not only be invisible from the house but also possibly benefit from a more suitable soil. Kitchen gardens need fertile, well-drained soil, a plentiful supply of water, a sunny aspect – if possible sloping towards the south – and protection from gales, frosts, fogs and damp.”

Walls surrounding a garden allowed the ambient temperature within to be raised by several degrees, thus creating a microclimate enabling plants to be grown that would otherwise not survive in the general local climate. The walls, constructed of brick or stone, absorbed and retained solar heat that was then slowly released, raising the temperature allowing such fruits as peaches, nectarines and grapes to be grown on espaliers, particularly on the south facing walls. A number of walled gardens had one hollow wall with openings in the stonework so that fires could be lit inside the wall, thus providing extra heat to protect the fruit growing against that wall, the smoke from the fires being directed upwards through chimneys or flues. An example of such a wall can be found in the walled garden at Croxteth Hall, Liverpool which has been described as a hidden treasure almost untouched by time .

If providing for the needs of a large country house, for its staff, and possibly the estate workers, the walled kitchen garden sometimes resembled a quasi-industrial site, with hothouse furnaces, a row of workshops, tool rooms, storerooms and coal houses as well as the plots for produce. Little wonder then that such a place should be sited as far away as possible from the house, with all the activity, the noise and often the noxious smells that were created. According to Susan Campbell, The gardeners were kept busy weeding, digging, sowing and picking their crops. They also had to wash, trim, bunch and pack the produce, then cart or carry it to the house.

Most walled gardens followed a similar plan, a ‘four-square’ creating four distinct sections. This design can be traced back to the ancient gardens of classical Greece and Rome.

A typical walled garden would contain a mixture of fruit, vegetables and flowers (flowers – especially those grown for cutting and decorating the big house – were an important element of the walled garden) and the four-square design allowed for these different elements and allowed them to be turned into features in their own right, similar to the French potager, with vegetables arranged in decorative formations.

The architecture of the walls, glasshouses, frame-houses and forcing pits introduced structural elements while features such as brick or tile path edgings, central dipping pools, and iron fruit tunnels were as attractive as they were practical, says garden historian Anne Jennings.

One of the most exotic fruits for gardeners to produce was the pineapple, and many 18th-century walled gardens were equipped with pits and beds in which to raise them. To produce a pineapple for the delight of dinner guests was one way in which landowners could display their wealth. “The first pineapples grown in England were cultivated by a Dutch merchant in 1718, by a method perfected earlier in Holland,“ says Susan Campbell, “The plants were raised in pits filled with fermenting oak bark, a waste product of the leather-tanning trade. This bark produced a moister, more equable and longer-lasting heat than horse manure, and the pits (known as tan beds) gave a better insulation. The young pines were overwintered in specially built ‘pineries’ similar to the new, lean-to glasshouses but with lower roofs.”

Thus carved stone pineapples would decorate rooftops and gateways, and in 1761 John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore, had an elaborate pineapple-shaped building built constructed in his walled kitchen garden, the ground floor being a hot house for the growing of the fruit, the upper floors having two small apartments, or bothies, for the gardeners.

The Victorian era heralded the golden age of classic walled kitchen gardens. Now, instead of being banished to the outer reaches of estates, they became its hub, with fabulously engineered glasshouses which were heated by intricate networks of pipes and mechanisms which allowed for the opening and closing of sections of glass to conserve heat and/or allow ventilation. The repeal of the Glass Tax in 1845, combined with the invention of cheap plate glass, led to an upsurge in the production of hothouses so that even in an average size kitchen garden up to a third of the area might be under glass. But the greatest cost was not in their construction but in their heating, and the smoke generated was, in some gardens, taken away by underground flues to a high ornamental chimney some distance away. One such chimney is at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew where basement boilers sent heat into the glasshouse via water pipes running beneath iron gratings in the floor. A tunnel ran between the Palm House and the chimney, in the style of an Italianate campanile, which stands beside Victoria Gate. This 150-metre long (490ft) passage served the dual purpose of carrying away sooty fumes and also enabling coal to be brought to the boilers by an underground railway. (Today, the glasshouse is heated using gas, and the tunnel houses the Palm House Keeper’s office.)

Large walled gardens required a dedicated team of gardeners and under-gardeners who worked almost around the clock, manning the boilers, tending the mushroom houses, seed and packing rooms. Bothies – where young unmarried gardeners lived and who were on hand to keep the boilers and hot walls fuelled – provided windproof and watertight shelter. The best known estate bothy is the one in the Royal Gardens at Windsor Castle, built to house 25 people, and which was used by improver gardeners and ex-servicemen estate workers.

With such vast acreage under cultivation, preparation and storage was of equal importance. Once gathered, the daily supplies for the kitchen were sorted, washed, trimmed, bundled and made ready in boxes, and as attractively as possible, for delivery to the house. Stores of fruit, vegetables and root crops also required attention, both in their preparation and in their constant checking over. “The choicest apples and pears were placed individually on slatted wooden shelves,“ says Susan Campbell while “certain varieties of thick-skinned acid cherries and plums, along with gooseberries and currants were also kept in the fruit room”.

“Economic necessity saw the end of the walled kitchen garden as a working productive garden during the early 20th century,“ says Anne Jennings, “but a few survive and several have been restored in recent years. These include the remarkable West Dean Gardens in East Sussex and the restored gem at Heligan in Cornwall.”

Further reading

• Cottesbrook – An English Kitchen Garden by Susan Campbell (Century)
• Walled Kitchen Gardens by Susan Campbell (Shire Publications)
• A Little History of British Gardening by Jenny Uglow (Chatto & Windus)
• Victorian Gardens by Anne Jennings (English Heritage)