Before The Emergence Of Global Trade
Six Word Photo Story Challenge: Freestyle
The walled garden is your supermarket.
Victorian walled gardens were popular on UK TV in the latter part of the last century. The Victorian Kitchen Garden and its sequels ran for almost a decade from the mid1980s. The original programme saw a derelict walled garden restored to become a working kitchen garden.
Walled gardens are a key part of the history of the UK, having once numbered many thousands across the country — providing both food and employment. A walled kitchen garden at a large country house would feed the family, the staff, and guests the year round, and would often have its own dedicated team of gardeners. The high walls provided both protection and warmth. Bricks retained enough heat to grow exotic fruits on plants trained up the walls. The walled gardens belonged to the bigger houses whose owners had the space and money to build and maintain them.
The gardens typically ran from an acre to 12 acres in size, though the kitchen garden at Welbeck Abbey is a colossal 20 acres. The more ambitious gardens had such additions as vineries and pineapple pits.
The walled kitchen garden was the supermarket of its day, often outgunning today’s UK supermarkets in terms of its variety of fresh produce.
The photograph shows part of the high wall of what used to be a country house kitchen garden that now houses a stable block and a sheltered field.
The gardeners behind the Victorian walled garden featured in the original TV series died in the early 2000s, and no one took up their baton. Sadly the garden has now returned to the derelict state it was in before the cameras started to roll.
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