Undercover artists

Cast in iron and typically painted off-white, they sit in stately rows on vegetable plots, their elegant appearance that of diminutive glasshouses. Traditional cast-iron garden cloches with their pitched roofs resemble little houses or lanterns, neatly arranged to shelter shallots in bitter February or defenda crop of chard from hungry snails, and help yield bountiful supplies of salad leaves and herbs in cooler months.

These helpful garden tools are used to produce earlier, faster and out-of-season crops by creating an. By Victorian times, the cast-iron and glass cloche had been developed. At The Great Exhibition in London in 1851, these cloches – which resembled the giant cast-iron and glass structure of Crystal Palace in which the exhibition was held – were among the products on view. In the early 20th century, cloche gardening was considered so vital that one JLH Chase, who invented the barn cloche, published a book on the subject and produced pamphlets on the value of cloches in wartime Britain, including one entitled ‘Cloches versus Hitler’.