The Walled Garden at Hartsmere Hall

For most of the twentieth century, the walled garden at Hartsmere Hall was a wilderness of sycamore saplings and nettles, its glasshouses reduced to rusting frames and its paths lost beneath decades of leaf litter. Yet the enclosure itself, almost two acres of ground surrounded by brick walls nearly four metres high, survived largely intact, and it was this survival that persuaded a small group of local volunteers to attempt its restoration. Fifteen years on, the garden is once again in full production, supplying fruit, vegetables and flowers to the hall's café and to a weekly market stall, and it has become one of the most frequently visited heritage sites in the county.

Walled gardens of this kind were status symbols as much as practical kitchen gardens. A wealthy landowner of the late eighteenth century expected to serve pineapples, peaches and grapes at his table, and the only way to produce such fruit in a northern climate was to create an artificial one. The walls did precisely that. Brick absorbs the sun's warmth during the day and releases it slowly at night, so that the air within the enclosure could be several degrees warmer than the surrounding parkland. Some estates went further, building hollow walls through which smoke from small furnaces was passed to keep frost away from blossom in spring.

Visitors today enter, as the gardeners always did, through the Main Gate, a pair of wrought-iron doors set in the middle of the south wall. From there, a broad gravel path runs straight ahead to the Dipping Pond, a stone-edged pool at the very centre of the garden from which the gardeners once filled their watering cans. A second path crosses the first at the pond, running from the west wall to the east wall, so that the ground is divided into four roughly equal quarters, an arrangement that was almost universal in gardens of the period.

The warmest position in any walled garden is against the north wall, because it faces south and receives the most sunshine, and it was here that the most valuable structures were placed. At the western end of the north wall stands the Vinery, a long lean-to glasshouse in which the restored grapevines, propagated from cuttings of a plant found growing wild in the ruins, now produce several hundred bunches a year. Immediately to the east of it is the peach house, where the trees are trained flat against the back wall so that every fruit receives an equal share of light. Beyond that, the potting shed, a modest brick building with a slate roof, houses the original wooden benches and racks of clay pots, many of them stamped with the name of a long-vanished local pottery. The north-eastern corner is occupied by the Bothy, a cramped two-room cottage in which unmarried apprentice gardeners lived, often sleeping beside the furnaces so that they could tend them through the night.

Each of the four quarters has its own character. The north-western quarter, closest to the Vinery, is given over entirely to the asparagus beds, which take three years to establish but then crop for two decades or more; the volunteers planted them in the first year of the restoration and harvested their first spears in the fourth. Across the central path from them, in the north-eastern quarter, is the Cutting Garden, where dahlias, sweet peas and other flowers are grown in straight rows purely for picking. On the left as one walks in from the Main Gate, the south-western quarter is enclosed by netting to form a fruit cage, which protects currants, gooseberries and raspberries from blackbirds. Finally, the south-eastern quarter has been laid out as a physic garden, containing more than a hundred plants that were once used in household remedies, each labelled with its traditional purpose and a warning about its dangers.

Not every decision was straightforward. The volunteers debated at length whether to use modern varieties, which are more productive and resistant to disease, or to grow only those that would have been available when the garden was at its height. In the end they compromised, growing historic varieties wherever possible but accepting newer ones where the old types had disappeared or proved impossibly difficult to keep healthy. They also introduced a rainwater harvesting system, carefully hidden behind the glasshouses, after several dry summers threatened the crops.

The garden's success has encouraged similar projects elsewhere, and the volunteers now run training days for groups hoping to rescue their own neglected enclosures. Their advice is always the same: begin by understanding the walls, because everything else in the garden depends on them.