Heritage veg with a modern touch

It was in September last year that editor Steve and deputy editor Emma travelled to Gravetye Manor in Sussex to meet Tom Coward, a talented young head gardener with a unique task – restoring the garden of William Robinson, the great and influential Victorian gardener.

Tom told us: “The oldest parts of the manor date from 1590 and Ernest George, a great architect, did a lot of work on it in the 1880s until 1906. He was Edwin Lutyen’s mentor and so it was right on the edge of the arts and crafts movement.”

The Robinson legacy

It was in 1884 that William Robinson (1838-1935) purchased Gravetye Manor. Robinson was the person most credited with developing the herbaceous border and wild garden, which were eventually to replace formal Victorian planting schemes throughout the UK.

“William Robinson was an amazing man,” Tom continued. “He started life in total poverty in Ulster during the potato famine. His father ran off to the United States and left him to look after his mother and he came over to London. He did incredibly well to earn a living and eventually turned his hand to writing. He started his own journal The Garden, and also contributed to other titles such as Country Life and wrote many popular gardening books.” He made enough money from his writing to buy Gravetye and around 200 acres of surrounding land and set about experimenting and developing his ideas.

When he died the estate was left to the Forestry Commission and became sadly neglected. “Following this, in the 1960s it became a hotel and was a great success but in recent years it really struggled and the gardens are the first thing to suffer when money is short.

A new era dawns

“I started 18 months ago and the whole garden was full of bindweed. Here in the flower garden (close to the house where our tour started) to tackle the bindweed we are carrying out an annual cultivation and planting with annuals. Herbaceous perennials will follow when we have cleared the weeds.

“As far as the planting is concerned what he planted where is all documented. However, it changed rapidly; we want to be progressive but retain his ethos, his style; whereas with the hard landscaping we want to restore that to his design as far as possible.

Fruitful delights

Of course there are many wonderful ornamental areas to the garden, but we were there to concentrate on the productive parts, starting with the orchard. This is being replanted and Tom has marked out the planting pattern of the trees. He won’t replant the whole area – just 20 or so trees to suggest how the area would have looked. Cooking apples are popular with the chefs in the restaurant today and so a number of the apples will be of culinary varieties.

Tom picked some apples from an old tree and we stood munching them. “This is ‘Egremont Russet’ Tom told us. “Lady Egremont visited recently (the ‘Egremont Russet’ is thought to have been raised by the Earl of Egremont at Petworth House in Sussex in the early 1870s). She is a member of the Walled Kitchen Gardens Network (www.walledgardens.net) and members from the network came for a look around.

“Like many of its members Lady Egremont is extremely knowledgeable and the group seemed excited by the work we are doing here and many of the features such as the old glasshouses.”

Walled wonders

Walking past the wild garden and croquet lawn we made our way to the main purpose of our visit, the magnificent walled kitchen garden. “It took two Irish fellas two years to build the wall and apparently Robinson was planting peaches as soon as he could,” Tom told us.

Unusually Gravetye’s walled garden is circular. “At first you think wow, that’s genius,” said Tom, “but then you work with it for a while and realise you have to make all your rows at strange angles to fit them in. The big advantage is that there are no awkward shady corners in the north east or north west. There is very little shade at all. Probably not enough for the gooseberries but we can always put some shading over the fruit cage.”

The area was so badly overgrown when Tom arrived last year that the garden wasn’t cropped at all and he and his team of six gardeners spent the year removing weeds and spraying the ever-present bindweed with glyphosate. “We would like to become organically certified eventually, but we couldn’t have cleared this lot without the weedkiller,” he told us.

Modern tastes

“We are now growing vegetables for the kitchen. We specialise in flavours that you can’t buy, so fresh asparagus and yellow raspberries and baby veg. All summer we have been self-sufficient in cut flowers, which I am very pleased with. We are also growing on lots of herbaceous perennials here at the moment for restocking the ornamental garden.

“This year we have grown root crops, leaves and herbs, cucurbits, brassicas and legumes.” Tom works closely with the chefs when it comes to supplying produce. So do they base their menu around what’s available in the garden or does Tom grow what they want? “It’s a bit of both. Usually they say ‘we would like this’ and I say ‘yes, but you have to take these carrots’!

“The great thing is that we have the garden up and running with all of the seasonal veg we are self sufficient in and it is getting from the garden on to people’s plates and that is really satisfying.”

Some of the old espalier fruit trees on the walls have been saved and are in the process of being pruned back into shape, but Tom has plans to replace some and fill gaps with more modern disease resistant varieties as well as some heritage ones. “I want to plant so many that it is probably better for us to get chip buds and roostocks which will be cheaper. It may take an extra couple of years to get fruit, but the garden has been here for 150 years so that won’t matter and it’s nicer to have grown your own.

“The soil was imported by Robinson and has had generations of muck on it, things grow so well here on the sheltered south-facing slope. I love the way the forest leans over the wall and the crisp wall and the rows of crops – the contrast between the wild and the formality.”

We passed a stone seat which was one of Robinson’s favourite resting places and is now one of Tom’s favourite spots. There is a lovely vista down to the well head at the bottom of the garden and the gardeners have made sure this is clear as it would have been in Robinson’s day.

Kiwis were dripping with fruit when we visited in September. “We had to wallop them right back as they hadn’t been pruned for years and they have responded well. But it is a valuable wall space and I would like to grow cherries or peaches there, so I may take some out and leave just one male and one female.”

We passed a patch of Princess alstoemerias and many other cut flowers to an area of fruit cages filled with various soft fruits. Tom explained that originally there was an avenue of espaliers running through the centre of the garden. “I’m thinking of having espaliers on quince A or M26 rootstocks so they should be low just on the lower part of the terrace and on the right have stepovers so that it balances (and doesn’t spoil the view from Robinson’s seat). This is a really exciting part of the garden – probably the nicest part.”

Some chickens were enjoying the sunshine in a temporary coop and beyond them at the bottom of the garden was a feature we had not come across before – a watercress bed.

“It is derelict now but used to be fed by a spring, but the spring moved. It will cost a lot of money to restore, but I’d love to get it working again. Also the kitchens have to be so careful about food hygiene and watercress has its own problems. The other thing I’m tempted to do is to fill it in with ericaceous (lime free) compost and grow blueberries.” The latter would be reversible, allowing the bed to be restored when funds were available.

We walked on past the watercress bed. “We had our spuds in here. ‘Picasso’ (a keen gardening friend says this is the best potato he has ever tasted), also ‘Charlotte’, ‘Pink Fir Apple’, ‘Lady Christl’ and ‘King Edward’. Then we green manured the area and as the nights get shorter we hope to allow the hens to run around in here to help clear pests.”

On past the ‘Sweet Genovase’ basil we reached neat rows of baby vegetables. “Baby veg are what the kitchens love most of all and so we grow lots of those.” If any grow to maturity, Tom does deals with the chefs to make sure they take them!

Visiting Gravetye Manor

● Vowels Lane, West Hoathly, Sussex, RH19 4LJ
The hotel and restaurant is open for bookings 365 days a year. Tours of the garden are available for small groups. Pre-booking is essential. Please contact the reception team on 01342 810567 for further information.