I have always been a fan of history, I read about it, watch documentaries and listen to podcasts. I mention this because I have always wanted to look into walled kitchen gardens, their history and current and potential future uses. Being a gardener, I have an interest in these spaces anyway as they are areas with a garden and gardens have plants in them (which is why I’m interested). Add to that my interest in growing my own food, past gardening techniques and how these compare to modern ones and then what past techniques are as valid now as they were in the past, which ones are beyond useless (the same with modern techniques and ideas-which are good, which aren’t). So, a lot to cover under the kitchen gardens title.

I thought the above would be a big enough area to look at, but starting to read means an absolutely huge area to cover. There is not just the many periods of English history to cover on this, there is some from Australia, the America continent, Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and the rest of Europe too. I had a fabulously grand notion that I would write maybe five blogs on the topic-it will be a lot more!

Today, I have decided that I am going to cover some of the basic ideas. As I still have a lot of research to do and that will take me a while, around all my studying and work, etc, that still has to go on regardless.

A walled garden is obviously a garden with a wall around it, a kitchen garden is one that grows food for the kitchen, but from my reading so far, many such gardens grew herbs for cooking as well as medicine and cut flowers for the houses they belong to. A walled garden can be any size-if it has walls and you grow plants, its walled garden-my own is such a garden. Back in the past, many urban gardens had walls around them for privacy of the inhabitants, so the walled garden was a default thing.

On British (I could say English, but a lot of what I say applies to Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish gardens too) country estates, the walls of walled kitchen gardens served a very good function. They provided protection for the plants inside. Located where those islands are, they can get cold, wet, foggy and windy-the walls protect the plants with from the worst of these extremes. The increased temperatures (due to the bricks absorbing the heat from the sun during the day) do allow plants that wouldn’t ordinarily grow in that climate to grow there (of course, there is a limit to this too). Some walls are also hollow to allow hot air (heated by furnaces) to flow through and keep the walls warmer.

Future posts will have far more detail in them on various aspects of kitchen gardens. I’ll be covering different countries and the history of their walled kitchen gardens, what crops were, and are, grown, the way the gardens were run-including the staff and gardening techniques needed to do so, and also how they are used to today too.

While many people will claim that such large spaces used by the wealthy in the past to show off (which was a lot of it, I cannot disagree), there is a lot than can be learned from these spaces. In the past, people couldn’t go to the supermarket for their food, they had to rely on whatever could be produced within their local area. This can be of a lot of use today, even though many of us do have access to supermarkets, which brought about the downfall of walled kitchen gardens (along with rising labour costs and cheaper food from overseas). I’ll talk about this too.

A lot of work to do, but every Sunday, I’ll be adding a new post about this subject that I really do find interesting.