The Walled Garden at Whithurst Park, West Sussex The home of Richard Taylor and Rick Englert
VIRTUALLY every cottage and country house in Great Britain and Ireland once had its own kitchen garden,’ wrote the late kitchen-garden historian Susan Campbell in the introduction to her book Walled Kitchen Gardens (Shire, 1998). She went on to chart their demise after the Second World War, when productive gardens of all sizes fell into swift and permanent decline. The reasons were clear: labour costs had soared and cheap imports of fruit and vegetables from around the world made the hard slog of growing your own not really worth the candle.
‘We worked in 480 tons of grit and 750lb of Epsom salts’
In the past few decades, all has changed again. We want to know both where our food is coming from and how our fruit and vegetables are grown—are they fresh and locally sourced, what about regular exposure to chemicals? To
