N 1898, the famous gardener and contributor to COUNTRY LIFE William Robinson built an elliptical walled kitchen garden for his home at Gravetye Manor in West Sussex. The perfect ellipse has rounded corners to trap the sun and, protected by massive walls of local Weald stone quarried from the estate, the acre and a half of ground would have supplied everything that its vegetarian bachelor owner could have desired. But, after two World Wars and with labour costs rising, the place echoed many such productive gardens and fell into disrepair. Robinson died in 1935 and, in the late 1950s, Gravetye was turned into a country-house hotel, but the renaissance of the walled enclosure as
