OUR GARDEN STORY
Sounds a bit portentous, I know, but it’s pretty straightforward
really. This part of Classic Gardening is about gardens that
represent great moments in British horticulture. It’s
about gardening firsts, gardening gurus, seminal moments and – above
all – preserved or restored gardens that bring that story to life. So
you can visit them, and get right in to the story.
Here are the first
five.
To read more, you can follow the links here to other installments in the story.
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Part Six
Part Seven
Part Eight
1 A Roman palace garden
What
did the Romans ever do for English gardening? Well, they gave us the
first garden designed purely for pleasure, among other things.
And, at Fishbourne Roman Palace , one of the most stunning 1st century private villas they built on our shores, the Roman gardens have been rediscovered and restored.
The Romans were skilled gardeners, as the excavations at Fishbourne have demonstrated. They improved
the PH of the acid, gravel soil there by applying loam; they knew about
forcing, pesticides, grafting and layering, and planted their
vegetables in narrow raised beds, just like they do today on Gardeners’
World.
Fishbourne’s
10 acres included a kitchen garden, an orchard, a formal courtyard with
pool and colonnaded walkways, and a landscaped park with views down to
the sea. There were lawns and topiary, box hedges and gravel paths,
espalier fruit trees and a mass of climbers.
The northern half of the formal garden has been excavated and replanted to its original plan, and there is a Roman Garden Museum complete with replica Roman potting shed and tools.
Here are a few other things the Romans did for us British gardeners.
They brought us the sweet chestnut, walnut, almond, apricot, quince, plum, fig, mulberry, medlar and sour cherry.
They brought the vine too.
They brought leeks, onions, turnips, radishes, cucumbers, lettuce, kale, artichoke and asparagus.
The
herbs they bequeathed us include dill, marjoram, parsley, mustard,
fennel (for wind), ground elder (for gout – it had to have a purpose
didn’t it) and wormwood (for worms).
2 The Anglo Saxons and the winesour plums of Sherburn-in-Elmet, South Yorkshire
When the Romans retreated from Britain in 410 AD, much of their gardening lore left with them.
The Anglo Saxons are not renowned as gardeners, but one haven of Roman gardening survived through to the middle ages and even – in part – to the present day.
Elmet
held out as an independent kingdom containing most of the former West
Riding of Yorkshire until 627, when the then king, Ceretic, was killed
fighting off the Northumbrians.
But
one Roman plant has survived to this day. The area is still famous for
its winesour plums, raised from suckers rather than grafting, which
were introduced by the Romans and, it seems, have survived over the 15
centuries since they departed.
In the 19th
century the town was famous for its orchards, most notably for its dark
purple, green-fleshed winesour plums, which were prized for preserve
making.
3 In a monastery garden
From the 6th century the monasteries kept gardening - plus learning, medicine and much else - alive in Britain.
The Benedictines, Augustinians, Cistercians, Carthusians and others
established great monasteries, and gardening was central to all these
orders. They needed substantial lands to feed their religious
communities and lay staff, and herbs to treat the sick.
No gardening records survive from England – Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries having much to answer for there - but plans for a monastic garden, drawn up in the 9th century and preserved at the abbey of St Gall in Switzerland, show us how gardening would have been conducted by the Benedictines.
At
Benedictine monasteries there would have been three acres of gardens
including a physic garden for herbs, and a monks’ cemetery planted with
apples and nuts (fruit-bearing trees symbolise the life cycle from seed
to fruit to decay.) There was a vegetable garden, with 18 beds,
arranged in two rows, for onions, garlic, leeks, shallots, parsley,
chervil, coriander and dill.
There is a reconstruction of a monk’s herb garden at Bede’s World in Jarrow, (pictured above)..
A Carthusian monk’s garden is recreated at Mount Grace Priory in North Yorkshire.
Carthusian
monks lived a solitary life; each housed in their own one-up one-down
house, with private garden, arranged around a cloister the size of a
cricket pitch. You can read my full article about Mount Grace Priory here
Monks brought new varieties of plants from mainland Europe.
The Knights Templar – a military order that protected pilgrims on the
journey to he Holy Lands and who were much maligned in the Da Vinci
Code - brought the Oriental plane.
There is one at Ribston Hall in the village of Ribston in West Yorkshire,
They also brought the windflower – anemone coronaris - known as the Blood Drops of Christ, and which grew in Palestine.
The Warden pear - a hard old English cooker used in pies and mentioned by Shakespeare, was sent from Burgundy
to grow in the Cistercian orchards of Warden in Bedfordshire. It could
be a synonym of the French Poire de Livre or Livre and in England was also known as the Black Pear of Worcester. It could be the same as the Pound Pear grown by the Romans in the first century.
Warden’s monastery is gone, but since 1986 wine has been produced at the spot where the monks had their vineyard.
4 Thomas a Becket’s fig tree, West Tarring, West Sussex
According
to one legend, Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas a Becket is credited
with planting an Italian fig tree that he brought back from pilgrimage
to Rome at the Archbishop’s palace in West Tarring.
Whether Becket, the ‘turbulent priest’ who was murdered on the orders
of Henry II in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170, is responsible or, as
other accounts have it, that St Richard of Chichester brought the fig here in the mid 13th century, it survived and was multiplied.
It
seems a fig orchard of three quarters of an acre was planted to the
south of the old palace in 1745 using cuttings from the original grove,
and by 1830 there were 100 trees producing 2,000 figs a year. Much of
the orchard was torn down in the last century, but there is still a fig orchard here; a dense grove within the old flint garden walls of a cottage on South Street.
It
is open to the public on just one day each year (normally the first
Saturday in July) but you can see some of them from the road.
5 The queen who brought us sweet rocket and the hollyhock
Eleanor
of Castile, wife of Edward 1, brought gardening fashions from Spain in
the late 13th century, and gardeners who knew the Moorish style
She introduced the beautifully-scented Sweet Rocket, also known as Dame's Rocket (Hesperis matronalis). Pictured above, it is a native of Castile and an annual or short lived perennial that self-seeds liberally.
She also brought Althea Rosea, the common hollyhock, back from Palestine, where she found it on crusade with her husband, and the Blandurel apple
That’s not all.
As the wonderful Brogdale national fruit collection website says: “The next influence on fruit growing in England
came from ... Eleanor ... who brought with her the legacy of Islamic
horticultural expertise, unaffected by the Dark Ages, in Moorish Spain.
The apple variety Blandurel is one of her notable introductions.” She
planted it in her orchards at LangleyManor in Hertfordshire.
At Guildford Castle
(pictured below) she had her Italian gardener, William Florentyn, plant
a herb garden she could step into straight from her private apartments.
FOR MORE OF OUR GARDEN STORY, FOLLOW THE LINKS BELOW
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Part Six
Part Seven
Part Eight
1 A Roman palace garden
