Renovating a Victorian Walled Kitchen Garden

Edwards Garden Services is currently involved in the design, maintenance, restoration and renovation of the grounds and landscape of a Grade II listed country villa overlooking the River Boyd between Bristol and Bath in South Gloucestershire.

Abandoned kitchen garden and old swimming pool

The Victorian property features a walled kitchen garden. Rough 1/3 acre, the kitchen garden has been neglected for a number of decades. A ramshackle terrace and swimming pool the setting for bramble patches, self sown hazel and rank grassland. In spite of its neglect and contemporary additions, there’s something magical about walking through a thicket of scrub, meadow and copse, stumbling across ancient pear trees and overgrown espaliers – glimpses of the high Victorian stone walls, relics from a productive past.

neglected walled kitchen garden — Kitchen garden with woodland encroaching

restoration of old fruit trees — Abandoned and overgrown fruit trees

Somewhat like ridge and furrow in old field systems, the undulating grassland with mower booby traps of half buried stonework suggest a layout of, presumably, vegetable beds which will be restored. The overgrown fruit trees will be renovated where possible, or used as parent material to graft new trees for the 15 foot high walls: espaliers and fans of apple, cherry, pear and plum.

A mix of regret in the brutal restoration work; diggers, brushcutters and chainsaws, balanced by the excitement and enthusiasm in restoring a lost garden.

Some proposed kitchen garden layouts, from Edwards Garden Design even incorporating, somewhat controversially, the questionable desire for an outdoor pool.

An aerial shot of Barrow Court from the 1960’s shows the formal layout of the Victorian kitchen garden (bottom right). Its walls decorated by old fruit espaliers. The railings within the divided walled garden still supporting some of the original trained fruit. Reaching the end of their lives, we grafted a number of the heritage varieties onto new rootstocks and have planted them in various gardens around Bristol and further afield.