The Country House Kitchen Garden 1600-1950

C Anne Wilson, C. Anne Wilson

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780752455945
• eBook ISBN: 9780750959049
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Country house kitchen gardens were designed as perfect 'grown your own' environments and ensured that many households were supplied with their own fruit and vegetables throughout the year. This book offers an insight into the digging and sowing of these gardens, as well as exploring how walled gardens contributed towards a sustainable lifestyle and often were a source of not just food, but also natural medicines. A wealth of contemporary illustrations, material from archives, gardening manuals, seed catalogues, engravings and other documents, paint a vivid picture of the country house kitchen garden and its development over three and a half centuries. This delightful book recounts an important part of our historic houses and their national heritage – to be enjoyed by gardeners and non-gardeners alike.

1

DIGGING, SOWING AND CROPPING IN THE OPEN GROUND, 1600–1900

SUSAN CAMPBELL

The layout of a kitchen garden in the early seventeenth century, with grid-like paths dividing the open ground into cultivable compartments or ‘quarters’, is classical; it is an ancient design that enabled the soil to be worked on and watered by the most simple and direct means. It is a layout that would have been seen too, in kitchen gardens throughout the three centuries covered by this chapter, and one that is still adhered to today. Over the same period, although there is a marked increase in the number of varieties of each type of fruit, salad and vegetable grown on the open ground, the crops remain remarkably similar.

However, three characteristics of the kitchen garden were to change considerably between 1600 and 1900. First, the kitchen garden itself, which had hitherto been close to the house, began to be moved further from it. Second, the walls surrounding the kitchen garden became progressively higher. Third, the raised or sunken beds within the quarters, and the small paths which had previously separated them, were to disappear, so that crops could be grown on the flat, in long rows.

The alteration of the kitchen garden’s position vis-à-vis the house was due partly to seventeenth-, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century aesthetics and partly to the realization that a kitchen garden’s requirements of soil, drainage, shelter, space, aspect and access were often better suited by a site that was not necessarily beneath the very windows of the mansion. The recognition, early in the seventeenth century, that ornamental plants had different requirements from plants grown as food, and the development of new methods of cultivation, were further reasons for the removal of the kitchen garden to a distance. The kitchen garden walls were built increasingly high, at first to support a greater area of fruit trees, and later to accommodate lean-to glasshouses as well. The protection afforded by high walls also benefited crops grown on the open ground, but their forbidding appearance, from the outside at least, and the way in which they interrupted views from the house, were further reasons for the re-siting of the kitchen garden.

This chapter is primarily concerned with the ways in which the beds on the open ground were dug, sown and cropped; however, some mention of the situation of the kitchen garden and its walls must be made as well, since the subjects are linked.

THE EARLY SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY KITCHEN GARDEN

At the start of the seventeenth century, the kitchen garden of a family with moderate means was an integral part of the garden as a whole. It was usually found close to the ‘offices’ – that is to say the kitchen, outbuildings and stables – but it was often visible from the best rooms as well. Vegetables and salads were grown in compartments, in individual beds, with small mud paths between them. They might be screened from the visitor’s view by flowery borders or fruit trees trained on open fencing. (This form of screen was known later as a polehedge or contre espalier.) Coarser fruits and vegetables – cider apples and perry pears, peas and beans for drying, and various root crops – could be grown in orchards and fields, but the early seventeenth-century kitchen garden, like the Tudor garden that preceded it, contained a mixture of fruit trees and fruit bushes, salad plants, useful herbs, tender, edible roots and delicate leafy vegetables as well as flowers and ornamental shrubs.

The owners of these gardens stored vegetables with good keeping qualities over the winter months, but they also liked to have freshly gathered vegetables in the winter. Vegetables and salads were needed to add variety too, to a Lenten diet. To fulfil these requirements they sowed as many hardy varieties of vegetable as possible in the late summer, thinning them or transplanting them in the autumn and leaving them to grow in sheltered beds and borders over winter. Cabbages, beets, spinach, certain varieties of lettuce, endives, turnips and broad beans came into this category; with the advent of hotbeds and glasshouses (see Chapter 5) the choice was very much extended.

Cut-and-Come-Again

The desire for sweet and tender vegetables was satisfied in some cases by allowing leafy plants with a tendency to do so to sprout again after cutting. This technique, now known as cut-and-come-again, was practised by the Greeks and Romans, as well as by gardeners of every age thereafter. Basil, lettuce and cabbage benefited in particular from this technique, which was also applied to beets, borage, orach, greens and leeks. Earth was raked over the stumps in summer so that they sprouted again four or five times.

The late Tudor garden, as described by Thomas Hill in The Gardener’s Labyrinth, in 1577, was very similar in layout to a kitchen garden at the start of the seventeenth century. (The book was reissued several times until 1660.) Hill’s garden was divided into winter and summer crops and the beds were grouped according to species.

Brassicas such as coleworts and cabbages were placed in one section of the garden, in ‘large and long’ beds a foot apart. An alley 3 feet or more wide divided them from the next section, which consisted of ‘beddes of a reasonable bredth for the Rapes and Turen [turnip] roots’. Smaller beds of leafy, annual salad plants and culinary herbs such as orach, spinach, rocket, parsley, sorrel, chervil, leaf-beets, dill, mint and fennel formed one section; the onion tribe another. Asparagus, which was cooked and eaten cold as a salad, was also grown in this quarter, and treated as a perennial.

Woody, perennial herbs such as sage, lavender, rosemary, thyme and marjoram had their own beds too, though by the seventeenth century these tended to be more permanent than those of the annuals. Another section was devoted to nursery beds for cuttings and flower, salad and vegetable seedlings which were transplanted, when large enough, to other beds. There were individual beds for strongly scented herbs and for medicinal herbs, as well as for onions and their relatives and for melons and cucumbers.1 Hill’s beds, like those in the gardens of the centuries preceding him, and indeed like the beds today in many north African and Mediterranean gardens, were based on those of the gardens of ‘the worthie Antients’ – the authors of the Greek and Roman husbandries – from whom Hill also took much of his advice.

Hill emulated the Romans by growing his vegetables, useful herbs and salads in individual beds, but the Elizabethans and early Stuarts liked to combine utility with pleasure. The one enclosure, usually formed by walls, fences, close palings or hedges, was embellished with arbours covered by vines, melons and scented climbers; it was provided with shaded benches, camomile seats and a source of water such as an ornamental pool, well or fountain. Water was applied to individual plants as well as the paths used as channels by means of pumps and watering pots.

In many Tudor gardens a raised walk was built inside the enclosing walls to form a promenade from which the surrounding landscape could be viewed. This effectively reduced the height of the wall inside. As the seventeenth century progressed, and the taste for delicate fruits such as peaches, dessert grapes and figs increased, old-fashioned raised walks became redundant. The inner walls needed to be high enough to support fruit trees of a decent size.

To add a further touch of decoration, some of the vegetable beds within the quarters were laid out in circular or diagonal patterns and, as these gardens were for walking and talking in as well as for produce, the main paths were covered with sifted sand to keep visitors’ feet dry. In this way the owner could ‘… diligently view the prosperitie of his hearbes and flowers … for the delight and comfort of his wearied mind …’.2

Preparing the Ground

In classical Mediterranean gardens and in European gardens thereafter, the quarters which were to be sown and planted with summer salads, vegetables and roots were dug and dunged all over in the autumn, before the frosts set in, then laid out and sown in the spring. The quarters which were to be sown in the autumn were dug and manured in the spring, leaving them fallow all summer; either way, digging allowed the benefits of heat and cold, air and moisture to work on the soil.

Before the quarters were formed into beds and planted they were well dug again, then raked and hoed to get rid of stones and weeds. Pliny reckoned that it would take eight men a day to dig a Roman acre (two-thirds of an English acre) 3 feet deep, mixing dung as they went and marking it out in plots.3 Hill’s gardener marked the size, shapes and positions of his beds, plots, borders and channels:

of such a breadth especially troden forth, that the weeders hands may well reach into the middest of the same, least they thus going to the beddes … treade downe both the seedes shooting up, & plants above the earth. To the helpe of which, let the paths betweene the beddes be of such reasonable breadth (as a mans foote) that they passing along by, may freely weede the one halfe first, and next the other half to weede.

The resulting beds came to exactly the same size as those described in the ancient husbandries: they were 6 feet wide and 12 feet long ‘if the plotte be large’.4

Trenching

Open ground intended for vegetable crops was dug extra deeply, or trenched, every four or five years. This is a system of digging with spades that probably pre-dates the agricultural plough; the depth of Pliny’s digging suggests that trenching was practised by the Romans. John Evelyn describes trenching as: ‘The digging two-spades depth deepe, & making a Trench, laying the first spade-depth of earth formost, the second & worst behind it, so as when the Trenches are finish’d, the first earth be thrown in, the next above it.’5 Evelyn’s Scottish contemporary John Reid goes into more detail, and concludes with the advice ‘… and if at every trenching you apply proper manures mixt with the second spading, or under the last shovelling, and in five years retrench, it will become to your wish, for all gardens, and plantations.’6

Digging was done with spades and mattocks rather than forks; seventeenth- and eighteenth-century forks were made of iron, but were not strong enough for heavy digging. They were used for lifting dung and garden rubbish, digging up root vegetables and, with spades or hoes, for lightly stirring or ‘tilling’ the soil. It was not until the mid-nineteenth century that strong, steel-tined forks began to be manufactured for the express purpose of digging the ground.

Beds and Channels

Hill’s vegetable beds, again as in Roman gardens, were separated by well-trodden and gently sloping paths which could be used when necessary as irrigation channels, taking water to each bed. Hill noted too that the channels might be supplied with central gutters to help them carry surplus rain into a convenient place at the lowest point of the garden. (The problem of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Digging, Sowing and Cropping in the Open Ground, 1600–1900
• 2 The Supply of Seeds, Plants and Trees to the Kitchen Garden and Orchard, 1600–1800
• 3 The Walled Gardens at Shugborough in Staffordshire
• 4 Growing Aromatic Herbs and Flowers for Food and Physic
• 5 Glasshouses and Frames, 1600–1900
• 6 Walled Gardens and the Cultivation of Orchard Fruits in the South-West of England
• 7 The Country House Kitchen Garden in Scotland, 1600–1900
• 8 From Garden to Table: How Produce was Prepared for Immediate Consumption
• 9 Preserving the Fruit and Vegetable Harvest, 1600–1700
• 10 Of Each a Handful: Medicinal Herbs in the Country House
• Select Bibliography 1577–1845
• Further Reading
• National Trust Properties: Walled Gardens
• National Trust Properties: Orangeries
• Copyright