Garden
The walled garden provides an essential all year round supply of organic vegetables for sale in the shop and for others living close by, thanks to Phil Sumption and his green fingers which have transformed the place over nearly a decade. Phil’s day job is a researcher and organic advisor at HDRA where he runs organic vegetable variety trials. He also grows here many heritage varieties of vegetables for the Heritage Seed Library at Ryton.
History – Our organic vegetable garden goes back to the time of Rector John Fanshawe who had the walls built in the mid-18th Century to enclose and shelter his new garden. In Victorian times it would have grown into an increasingly production ‘kitchen garden’ and orchard, feeding the successive generations of Marriotts and residents of the Estate until around 1914. In the early 1950′s it was run as a market garden, producing tomatoes. 1958 saw the coming of the heavy traffic era with the building of the A426 which by-passed the village but divided the Estate agricultural land from the infrastructure of buildings, involved the removal of 100 trees and contributed to the gradual decline of the garden buildings and greenhouses.
We have also gradually been restoring the orchard…watch this site for more information in due course.
Tours of the garden take place on special shop open days (see their Events page), in conjunction with farm walks or by special request. Please contact us for more details.
