Members of the aristocracy, country squires and rich merchants all aspired in the past to owning a large country house surrounded by a park and garden. These open spaces had to be carefully tended and therefore they were looked after by an army of gardeners and park keepers.

And it was not just the ornamental gardens that had to be looked after: there was also the garden in which vegetables and fruit were cultivated. There were no superstores in those days and the family, the retinue of servants and visitors all had to be fed and watered 365 days a year. Ordinary families either had a cottage garden or an allotment but the rich and titled had a walled kitchen garden. Many country house gardens still survive, but most are now owned by trusts and managed as visitor attractions rather than as the private spaces and suppliers of food and vegetables for grand families.

The country house garden
The country house ornamental garden changed enormously in size, layout and design over the centuries. The earliest ornamental gardens for which we have a clear idea of their layout are from the Tudor period and were formal and symmetrical, often with a central path leading to a series of parterres (level areas of ornamental gardens) laid out as knot gardens, geometrically-shaped areas bordered by tightly-clipped dwarf shrubs (most often box) or herbs. Flower-filled knots were known as ‘closed knots’ and those only filled with coloured earth, pebbles or non-plant coloured materials were called ‘open knots’. Early gardens also contained covered walks, constructed out of shrub-covered trellis work, where family members and guests could sit and converse. This simple layout changed drastically over the centuries but many country houses still possess a knot garden, as visitors to country houses such as Hampton Court or the National Trust’s Little Moreton Hall in Cheshire and Oxburgh Hall in Norfolk will testify.

Over the centuries the ornamental garden acquired many exotic flowers, grasses, shrubs and trees; topiary came and went out of fashion; the ‘Gardenesque’ style and wild gardens succeeded the ‘Picturesque’; and bedding systems and the herbaceous border came to the fore. Many gardens also had fern and alpine gardens. And last but not least ‘pastiche gardens’, mimicking gardens of different times and different places became a feature of late 19th and early 20th century gardens, most notably Italianate and Japanese gardens.

The country house walled kitchen gardens varied in size from about one acre in the case of the aspiring merchant or professional owner, to twenty or thirty acres in the case of a leading aristocratic family. They were usually rectangular and divided into four quarters surrounded by brick walls as high as 12 feet. In some cases the walls were heated. The walls had a number of functions: they provided shelter, and they absorbed and transmitted heat. Fruits such as apples, pears and cherries were grown against the walls, with exotic fruits such as nectarines and peaches being grown under glass, netting, mats or canvas on the south-facing wall. Old walled kitchen garden walls are still often peppered with nails used for holding fruit against them. Inside or outside the walled garden, depending on its size, were glasshouses, including vineries for growing grapes and pineries for growing pineapples. Also outside the garden, usually built against the outside of the north wall, was the boiler house and a series of sheds including a potting shed, storage sheds and often the gardeners’ mess room.

Garden workforces in the 18th and 19th centuries at the height of country house living were of a large size. In 1790, for example, at Wentworth Woodhouse, the home of the 4th Earl Fitzwilliam in South Yorkshire, the head gardener had under him 27 gardeners. All but three of these were ‘common labourers’, including four females. The other three were two foremen and a carter. By the mid-19th century the labour force at Wentworth Woodhouse was between 40 and 50 with the annual wages bill over £1,000. In 1905 at Clumber House in Nottinghamshire, the home of the Dukes of Newcastle, the head gardener employed 29 gardeners with a wage bill of about £1,000. But these numbers were quite small when compared to the labour force employed in a royal walled kitchen garden: the kitchen garden alone at Windsor Castle constructed for Queen Victoria in 1844 covered 36 acres and employed 150 gardeners.

The working day

The length of the working day was usually governed by the work bell which might be located at the entrance to the kitchen garden, or at the neighbouring stables or home farm. Its loud clanging sound would be within hearing distance of all the outdoor estate workers. The workforce got up very early for most of the year. A ‘set of orders and regulations’ have survived for the gardens at Wentworth Woodhouse for 1863 which show that from the beginning of April until the end of September work started at six o’clock in the morning and finished at six o’clock in the evening; in March and October work began at 6.30am and finished at 5.30pm; in February and November the hours of work were from 7am to 5pm and in January and December from 7.45am to 4.30pm. Work took place six days a week finishing at 4pm on Saturdays. The bell was also rung at noon for an hour’s lunch break. Once a fortnight on Fridays the lunch break lasted until 1.30pm so that wages could be paid. Staff would have waited in line at the head gardener’s office.

The workforce
A hierarchical system of employment gradually emerged on the large estates. A boy may be taken on as an apprentice (a garden boy) in his early teens, then become an improver journeyman, and then a journeyman proper and eventually a departmental foreman (eg in the vegetable garden, the glasshouses or the botanic garden). After a number of years as foreman he would be in a position to apply for the post of head gardener.

The head gardener reigned supreme in the gardens of a large country house. He was as important as the highest-ranking indoor servant. He was usually accommodated in a head gardener’s house very near to the kitchen garden where a close eye could be kept on the glasshouses. At Castle Howard in North Yorkshire the head gardener’s house was actually in the middle of the large kitchen garden. In some cases it was built into the kitchen garden wall, most often on the north side.

Married gardening staff and locally recruited garden boys lived with their families in estate cottages, but unmarried men from beyond the immediate locality were accommodated in a ‘bothy’ just outside the kitchen garden walls. This had the double advantage of making sure young staff got to work on time and always having young workers on hand to do extra watering, feed the boilers or adjust the ventilation in the glasshouses. The most famous gardener known to have lived in a bothy was Percy Thrower, presenter of the BBC’s Gardeners’ World from 1969 to 1976. That was when he was a journeyman gardener at Windsor Castle between 1931 and 1935.

The work of the gardeners
The variety of work undertaken by garden staff was enormous. It included not only regular sowing, weeding, watering, pruning, fertilising, fruit picking and storing but also the daily task of providing for the head cook the vegetables for the day’s meals. It also included the growing of flowers for cutting and decorating the rooms of the mansion. In the Wentworth Woodhouse archives it even gives the cost of the slippers to be worn by the gardening staff whose job it was to change the flowers in the rooms at the mansion in the early morning while the family were still sleeping.

The work of the most junior garden employee, the garden boy, was recalled by someone who joined the garden staff at Wentworth Woodhouse in 1936 at the age of 14. His first job every morning was to fetch milk from Home Farm and take it to the bothy where 14 unmarried gardeners lived. His next job was to go to the vegetable garden and collect the copper rain gauge and take it to the head gardener who measured the rainfall and recorded it daily. He then had to wash plant pots until 11.30am. He then went to the gardeners’ rest room to light the fire to warm the gardeners’ tea bottles. His lunch consisted of bread and jam wrapped in newspaper. His first job in the afternoon was to push a heavy wooden wheelbarrow into one of the neighbouring fields to collect cow dung. The filled barrow then had to be wheeled back to the greenhouses in which tomatoes were grown. The dung was put into sacks and dropped into tanks of water to produce the fertiliser for the tomatoes. Other regular afternoon jobs were supervising the delivery of coke for the boilers into the cellars and picking and packing fruit. On Saturdays he had to polish all the brass locks and knobs on all the glasshouses, inside and out. This was because on Sundays, if the weather was fine, the Earl and Countess and their entourage would walk through the gardens on their way to and from the parish church, inspecting everything very closely, the shale garden paths on which they walked having been raked smooth.

And of course, it was not only garden maintenance and production, but also design and redesign of the gardens that had to catered for as tastes and fashions changed. Technological change also had to be accommodated. For example, glasshouse production of fruit, flowers and vegetables took a great leap forward in the 1820s and 1830s with the development of coal-fuelled boilers which pumped hot water in pipes around the various glasshouses, the development of plate glass, and the replacement of wooden structures by cast and wrought iron. The most famous head gardener, Joseph Paxton, designed for the Duke of Devonshire at Chatsworth the Great Conservatory that was a forerunner of his Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition of 1851 in Hyde Park. Completed in 1839, this conservatory was the largest in the world. It was 277 feet long and a horse-drawn carriage could be driven through it!

But perhaps the most significant technological introduction was the lawnmower. Early landowners who wanted a well-cut lawn running away from their front windows had a problem: how to keep the grass short. Before the lawnmower was invented the grass had to be scythed or cropped by grazing animals. But this all changed in 1830. In that year the lawnmower was invented by Edwin Budding, an engineer from Stroud in Gloucestershire. He had previously designed a machine to take the knap off cloth that was destined to be made into guardsmen’s uniforms. Technical improvements in the 1850s and 1860s made the lawnmower indispensable in the gardens of large country houses.

And for the head gardener there was the important task of ordering seeds and young plants from seedsmen and nurserymen far and wide. For example, one order as early as 1761 from the head gardener at Cannon Hall in South Yorkshire, the home of the Spencer family, included 14 varieties of peaches, six of nectarines, six of apricots, six of cherries, 16 of plums and five of pears!

Another responsibility of the head gardener, assisted by gardening and park staff, was to collect and store ice from ponds and lakes in the estate grounds. In the days before refrigeration the ice was used for storing meat and fish in the summer months and for making desserts and cooling wines. The ice was stored in a special structure called an ice-house. It usually consisted of an entrance chamber leading to an often domed storage chamber, which was sunk below ground level.