Wall to wall abundance

The Walled Garden at Whithurst Park, West Sussex The home of Richard Taylor and Rick Englert Growing your own is one thing, says Tiffany Daneff, but building your own walled kitchen garden from scratch is a quite remarkable achievement

- Tiffany Daneff

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.

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 that end, old plots have been dug again and many walled gardens—their glasshouses broken and all signs of paths long since hidden by grass—have been restored. At Whithurst Park, however, Richard Taylor and his partner, Rick Englert, have gone one further and built a new walled garden from scratch.

They do have form: their magnificent Jacobean-style manor, complete with pavilion towers and faced with locally made red bricks, was designed by their great friend Kit Rae-Scott and completed in 2004.

By 2006, Mr Englert, a designer who was born in Texas in the US, had identified a suitable site for a walled garden on the north side of the house, where there was an area of scrubland and saplings leading to dense woodland, in which lies a lake. About 20 small trees were cleared by Henry Nicholls —a nice touch, as it was his great-grandfather who had once owned Whithurst and had planted the many Monterey pines (Pinus radiatus) that surround the property.