Carved lawn rollers by sculptor Eric Gill, at Ditchling Arts and Crafts Museum, Sussex
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Our final garden visit whilst travelling home from the Lake District last week, was to Southwell workhouse, Nottinghamshire.
We’d begun, you might recall, with the landed gentry at Kedleston Hall, then seen something of Victorian commercial and scientific endeavour at Biddulph Grange. It somehow seems appropriate, then, to find ourselves in the midst of gardening at the other end of the social spectrum- the poor.
Built in 1824 as a place of last resort for the destitute, it’s architecture was influenced by prison design and its harsh regime became a blueprint for workhouses throughout the country. We went round this fascinating building with the benefit of a number of helpful room guides and an audio tape guide- they say the best pictures are on radio, and the sparsely- furnished rooms came alive in the colourful descriptions and ‘real time’ excerpts from the workhouse regime. The garden is, as you might expect, exclusively for food growing, and though it is more of a demonstration of more general Victorian horticultural pratices, it captures the spirit of how gardening was practiced in the workhouse.
The cultivation of a garden and the rearing of livestock was frequently a feature of workhouse operation. There were a number reasons for this, mostly aimed at reducing the cost of providing poor relief. First, a garden could provide the workhouse with a cheap and ready source of food. Any surplus or unwanted produce could be sold off and provide funds for the running of the house. Another benefit of a garden was that it offered a convenient and regular form of employment for the inmates of the workhouse. Finally, training pauper children in agricultural or horticultural work could equip them with skills that would make them employable in their later life, rather than being a drain on the parish.
Sources and further information:
National Trust website
Workhouse Gardens and Farms
Old School Gardener
Stoke Poges Memorial Gardens
Weeding-
Tackle weeds early so they don’t have a chance to flower and then set seed- dig out perennial weeds and hoe out annual weeds on a dry day. Then cover any bare soil with a layer of mulch or ground-covering plants to smother new weeds before they get established. Control problem weeds with a weedkiller containing glyphosate.
Further information:
Weeds: non-chemical control-RHS
Dealing with weeds- BBC
Source: ‘Short Cuts to Great Gardens’ (Reader’s Digest 1999)
Old School Gardener
Picture by Jo Snowden
Our second visit whilst travelling to the Lake District last week, was to Biddulph Grange, in Staffordshire.
Restored over the last 30 years by the National Trust, this is a delightful series of gardens designed to house James Bateman’s (the original owner) extensive plant collection from around the world. This is achieved in a series of gardens within a strong overall design structure, featuring some amusing and beautiful touches typical of the Victorian age.
The gardens are a delight and I was fortunate to see the highlight (‘China’) last; a fitting climax as you wander round this fascinating window on one man’s passion for plants, superbly restored by the Trust. Wikipedia describes the devopment of the gardens:
‘Biddulph Grange was developed by James Bateman (1811–1897), the accomplished horticulturist and landowner; he inherited money from his father, who had become rich from coal and steel businesses. He moved to Biddulph Grange around 1840, from nearby Knypersley Hall. He created the gardens with the aid of his friend and painter of seascapes Edward William Cooke. The gardens were meant to display specimens from Bateman’s extensive and wide-ranging collection of plants….
Bateman was president of the North Staffordshire Field Society, and served on the Royal Horticultural Society‘s Plant Exploration Committee….“ He especially loved Rhododendrons and Azaleas. Bateman was “a collector and scholar on orchids,” …
His gardens are a rare survival of the interim period between the Capability Brown landscape garden and the High Victorian style. The gardens are compartmentalised and divided into themes: Egypt, China, etc.
In 1861 Bateman and his sons, who had used up their savings, gave up the house and gardens, and Bateman moved to Kensington in London. Robert Heath bought Biddulph Grange in 1871. After the house burnt down in 1896, architect Thomas Bower rebuilt it.
The post-1896 house served as a children’s hospital from 1923 until the 1960s; known first as the “North Staffordshire Cripples’ Hospital” and later as the “Biddulph Grange Orthopaedic Hospital” (though it took patients with non-orthopaedic conditions as well…. The 15 acre (61,000 m²) garden became badly run-down and neglected during this period, and the deeply dug-out terraced area near the house around Dahlia Walk was filled in level to make a big lawn for patients to be wheeled out on in summertime. The Bateman property was (and still is) divided: the hospital got the house and its gardens, and the uncultivated remainder of Biddulph Grange’s land became the Biddulph Grange Country Park…’
Further information: National Trust website
Old School Gardener
Wild Garlic at the foot of a Devon Hedge, Whitchurch
3 baths, one plastic and the other 2 cast iron were relocated from the old garden. We have decided to grow vegetables in them, as a preventative measure against the porcupines devouring all the vegetables. Here we have Happy installing a mini worm farm.
Holes were punched out the bottom of the bucket as well as the lid
Installation complete, ready for planting.
RELATED ARTICLES : A new twist to a keyhole/ circle garden
On a trip north last week, we managed to pack in three very interesting National Trust properties to and from our destination in the Lake District. The first was Kedleston Hall, the 18th century pile of the Curzons, an old Norman family who became prominent Tories in later times and built this magnificent home as a power statement to rival that developed by their Derbyshire Whig rivals, the Cavendish family, at Chatsworth.
We thought the front of the house reminiscent of Norfolk’s Holkham Hall, and indeed in the very helpful introductory talk we learned it had been designed by the same architects in Palladian style. However, the similarities started to dilute once we were inside, as the then Lord Curzon decided to follow the emerging design fashion of Neo Classical, so the house is an interesting- and successful – blend of the two styles.
The gardens- really more of a bold, sweeping landscape plus some slightly more human scale ‘pleasure grounds’- fit the classical style of the house and it was a lovely experience strolling around these before we had our lunch. Wikipedia describes the gardens and grounds:
‘The gardens and grounds, as they appear today, are largely the concept of Robert Adam. Adam was asked by Nathaniel Curzon in 1758 to “take in hand the deer park and pleasure grounds”. The landscape gardener William Emes had begun work at Kedleston in 1756, and he continued in Curzon’s employ until 1760; however, it was Adam who was the guiding influence. It was during this period that the former gardens designed by Charles Bridgeman were swept away in favour of a more natural-looking landscape. Bridgeman’s canals and geometric ponds were metamorphosed into serpentine lakes.
Adam designed numerous temples and follies, many of which were never built. Those that were include the North lodge (which takes the form of a triumphal arch), the entrance lodges in the village, a bridge, cascade and the Fishing Room. The Fishing Room is one of the most noticeable of the park’s buildings. In the neoclassical style it is sited on the edge of the upper lake and contains a cold bath and boat house below. Some of Adam’s unexecuted design for follies in the park rivalled in grandeur the house itself. A “View Tower” designed in 1760 – 84 feet high and 50 feet wide on five floors, surmounted by a saucer dome flanked by the smaller domes of flanking towers — would have been a small neoclassical palace itself. Adam planned to transform even mundane utilitarian buildings into architectural wonders. A design for a pheasant house (a platform to provide a vantage point for the game shooting) became a domed temple, the roofs of its classical porticos providing the necessary platforms; this plan too was never completed. Amongst the statuary in the grounds is a Medici lion sculpture carved by Joseph Wilton on a pedestal designed by Samuel Wyatt, from around 1760-1770.
In the 1770s George Richardson designed the hexagonal summerhouse, and in 1800 the orangery. The Long Walk was laid out in 1760 and planted with flowering shrubs and ornamental trees. In 1763 it was reported that Lord Scarsdale had given his gardener a seed from rare and scarce Italian shrub, the “Rodo Dendrone” (sic).
The gardens and grounds today, over two hundred years later, remain mostly unaltered. Parts of the estate are designated as a Site of Special Scientific Interest, primarily because of the “rich and diverse deadwood invertebrate fauna” inhabiting its ancient trees.’
Further information: National Trust website
Old School Gardener
Delightful planting in a Devon Wall, Mohuns Close, Whitchurch
Old School Garden 