WITHIN THESE WALLS
At Chilton, Harry Dodson reigns and Victorian values rule/JANE GARNER – Saga Magazine
A real walled garden is a rare and splendid sight. Rarer still comes an opportunity to walk and talk with a man who, for more than four decades, has nurtured and cultivated, plotted and potted to keep his walled world as it should be. But head man at Chilton Gardens in Berkshire, Harry Dodson, has allowed millions of armchair visitors to share his exceptional experience, first in the BBC series The Victorian Kitchen Garden, then as The Victorian Kitchen used his produce, and again in a new series starting at the end of October, The Victorian Flower Garden. Once again he is joined by presenter Peter Thoday, Lecturer in Horticulture at Bath University.
Harry Dodson is one of the last of England’s great estate gardeners; his knowledge and experience is unlikely to be surpassed and is rivalled by only a handful. He is held in such regard by the owners of “his” garden that they have made it over to him in trust for his lifetime, a gesture which paved the way for the television series.
Now aged 74, Harry is in his 44th year at Chilton and has spared no effort to provide a magnificent array of colour and blooms for the BBC’s film crew from Bristol. Following Victorian traditions and methods, he conspired with nature to produce flowers and plants at appropriate times of the year for arrangements, bouquets, wreaths, buttonholes and the host of uses expected at the Big House. Tall flowers for tall rooms, peonies in varying shades to match each decor, forced bulbs to flower in winter, rare varieties of ferns so coveted by Victorians, ancient sweet peas and poppies, a mosaic of plants in an intricate carpet bed, old roses, dainty daffodils and ornamental orchids – it’s all second nature to Harry.
“I could never have done anything else. I was born and brought up on one of these estates, a small one in Surrey. I have lived on them all my life apart from two years in the forces during the war. Gardening is a way of life and I started early. I was 27 when I came here and took charge. There have been only three head gardeners at Chilton since 1895.”
Walking with Harry in his domain is like stepping into the past, to life on a grander scale, a life of social etiquette, niceties and hierarchy long gone. As we walk, bees hum busily among myriad flowers, a partridge squawks in a seedbed and the head man wonders if it may bring friends for supper.
The garden is surrounded by high, quirky walls built with the lie of the land rather than any horizontal guide, every inch pockmarked with tiny holes caused by a method of pegging fruit trees; he put a stop to it soon after his arrival at Chilton, but the damage was done. Nobody is quite sure how old the gardens are. They pre-date the current Big House, and are still laid out as planned, cordoned by box hedge and gravel pathways.
Harry enjoyed two gardens as a small boy – one at home alongside the family house on the estate, the second at his school where girls grew flowers and boys cultivated vegetables and fruit. “The schoolmaster sold the produce and bought more seeds, plants and manure. In the summer we did half a day a week practical and in winter, if the weather was right, we were out there, or we had a lesson in school. There was a flower show in the village and we had to show our vegetables.”
Harry’s first top prize was for three lettuce when he was 12, but earlier he had won a third against adult gardeners. He has since won an envied collection of gold medals from the Royal Horticultural Society for vegetables and other Chilton plants. It seemed that the youngster had inherited green fingers from his mother’s side of the family, in which three uncles and a great uncle were renowned gardeners. “My father was in the gardens because he had been badly knocked about in the First World War. He was unable to go back to the railways, as a plate layer.”
Mr Dodson senior died when Harry was six and the boy continued to learn from a favourite uncle, who snapped him up as a ‘garden boy’ when, at 14, he was just old enough to leave Blackmoor School. “I shouldn’t really have left then, but there was a vacancy and my uncle wanted me badly. From there, you went on to become an ‘improver’ and then an ‘improver journeyman’ you were journeying through life, learning as you went.” The talented teenager quickly moved from a kitchen garden to the fruit houses as ‘third journeyman’, then moved to his first job away from home in Hampshire, often cycling 30 miles back to see his family. “Most of the senior gardeners were strict because they had been through the hoop with the old Victorian gardeners who were very strict.
“When I became head man, the staff had to call me Mr Dodson or Boss. They had to be respectful to you or they would hear about it! The head men on the estates were
in a class of their own. In pre-war days there were thousands of gardeners. A head man in a garden like this would never leave unless he was no good and got sacked. His sons and nephews would get jobs with his friends. If you had grown up on an estate you had a feeling for it and the gentry preferred people like that.”
Harry Dodson has no children and Chilton will revert to its owners when he is gone. But the head gardener who still cares for peonies he planted 35 years ago and fig trees he brought in five-inch pots from his last estate, will not abandon his beloved Chilton yet. “I have been asked how long can I go on. There are people who hope I will go on for years and finish my days here.”
It is hard to imagine the place without him. Meantime, he is busy keeping everything in order. For another visitation from the BBC? Harry will say no more and the bees are keeping it to themselves, too.
Mr Dodson senior died when Harry was six and the boy continued to learn from a favourite uncle, who snapped him up as a ‘garden boy’ when, at 14, he was just old enough to leave Blackmoor School. “I shouldn’t really have left then, but there was a vacancy and my uncle wanted me badly. From there, you went on to become an ‘improver’ and then an ‘improver journeyman’ you were journeying through life, learning as you went.” The talented teenager quickly moved from a kitchen garden to the fruit houses as ‘third journeyman’, then moved to his first job away from home in Hampshire, often cycling 30 miles back to see his family. “Most of the senior gardeners were strict because they had been through the hoop with the old Victorian gardeners who were very strict.
“When I became head man, the staff had to call me Mr Dodson or Boss. They had to be respectful to you or they would hear about it! The head men on the estates were in a class of their own. In pre-war days there were thousands of gardeners. A head man in a garden like this would never leave unless he was no good and got sacked. His sons and nephews would get jobs with his friends. If you had grown up on an estate you had a feeling for it and the gentry preferred people like that.”
Harry Dodson has no children and Chilton will revert to its owners when he is gone. But the head gardener who still cares for peonies he planted 35 years ago and fig trees he brought in five-inch pots from his last estate, will not abandon his beloved Chilton yet. “I have been asked how long can I go on. There are people who hope I will go on for years and finish my days here.”
It is hard to imagine the place without him. Meantime, he is busy keeping everything in order. For another visitation from the BBC? Harry will say no more and the bees are keeping it to themselves, too.
The Victorian Kitchen Garden
PART ONE: A LOVE LETTER
SANDRA LAWRENCE
It is thirty years since the first airing of the seminal BBC television series. The Victorian Kitchen Garden, a ground-breaking experiment in which an ailing walled garden was resuscitated for the cameras. Each episode trod a memory lane few remembered, yet somehow it got under the nation’s collective skin, fomenting a sea-change in attitudes to garden history in thirteen short weeks.
‘Lost’ gardens of the formal variety, such as Painshill Park in Surrey and the Plantation Garden of Norwich, were, in the 1980s, slowly being rediscovered by enthusiasts but, with hypermarket shopping and mass production, home vegetable-growing had reached a nadir. The Victorian Kitchen Garden re-?red the public imagination. Where would all those walled-garden makeovers at National Trust properties be without it? All those heritage seed companies, selling kohlrabi and Ne Plus Ultra peas – both of which saw the light of day on the programme for the first time in decades? I’d argue even big-hitters like the Lost Gardens of Heligan would still be pretty obscure without the pioneering VKG.
It was a televisual perfect storm: a passionate BBC researcher with an idea, a garden lecturer with enough weight to carry it, a producer with the vision to see it through – and an extraordinary ‘missing link’, who managed to connect a lost generation who thought vegetables magically arrived on supermarket shelves with a lost world that knew only too well where food came from.
Researcher Jennifer Davies’s idea was simple: to explore forgotten, rural ways of life through traditional, country estate kitchen gardens. Davies dreamed of recreating that world, if only for a fleeting moment, before it was too late. Her suggestion was grudgingly accepted by BBC bosses, as a single, half-hour programme. Davies, with producer Keith Sheather, developed that half-hour into a thirteen-part, mild-mannered monolith following a walled garden through a year’s worth of seasons. Ultimately the experiment expanded to four series, covering The Victorian Flower Garden, The Victorian Kitchen and The Wartime Kitchen and Garden.
Head gardener Harry Dodson was in his mid-sixties and already retired when he was approached by Davies. He was well known in gardening circles, having won ten Royal Horticultural Society gold medals (he served on the RHS vegetable committee for just shy of fifty years) but the television series would make his a household name. ‘He was ?own to Canada’, remembers Sarah Scrope, current owner of the walled gardens used for the series, at Leverton, part of the Chilton Estate. ‘He was even on Wogan’.
Forty years earlier, just after the Second World War, the potager at Leverton had been Dodson’s domain when, as head gardener, he ruled the roost with benign authority during the garden’s last hurrah. A quietly-confident, modest man with a soft, Hampshire burr, Harry’s wisdom needed no diva-ish antics to command the screen. He was tweed-jacket, collar-and-tie Old School.
Born in 1920, Dodson was too young for first-hand experience of horticultural zenith when vast country-estate gardens fed week-end guests, shooting parties in Scotland and the family town house during the London season – but the men (and they were always men) he worked for and deeply respected were of days when armies of liveried gardeners kept those grounds immaculate. We might have a romantic vision of bucolic charm today, but kitchen gardens were factories, involving as much sweat, pain and hard, hard graft as any cotton mill. These enchanted realms, and their stewards, were hard taskmasters. A solitary weed would have invited dismissal.
Dodson took his cue from dedicated, disciplined, highly skilled men. As head gardener he would not have been slow to upbraid a garden-boy for a grubby cap or sloppy crock-washing, but the admonishment would have held first-hand knowledge of how tough life was for gardening’s lowest of the low. In strict estate hierarchy, you started at the bottom, whoever you were.
Harry’s father died when he was six. He moved with his mother and brother to the Selborne estate at Blackmoor in Hampshire where his uncle, Fred Norris, was head gardener. Harry watched and learned. By the time he left school, aged fourteen, he could thin a bunch of grapes and tie a peach tree.
Despite his uncle’s position, Harry’s first job was as a garden boy, the horticultural equivalent of a scullery maid. Next step up was as journeyman which, as the name implies, meant travelling to find work. The ambitious young ‘improver journeyman’ found employment at Stansted Park, Hampshire, then Ashburnham Place in Sussex. After a brief posting in France during the Second World War Dodson, now general foreman at Nuneham Park in Oxfordshire, met the love of his life, Kathleen, whom he always called Jane.
Unmarried gardeners lived in the communal bothy. Head gardeners got a cottage to themselves. Harry took a punt, advertising himself as a potential head gardener, ‘to be married when suited’. It was a gamble; he was just twenty-seven but, wise beyond his years, his steady hand impressed the Ward family at the Chilton Estate near Hungerford and Harry Dodson became one of the youngest head gardeners in the country.
Twenty-three gardeners had formerly tended the estate, but war had decimated Britain’s young men. Dodson was in charge of eight. He persuaded Col. Ward to increase the number to between ten and twelve, but work was harder than ever.
Chilton’s kitchen garden at Leverton was typical of its kind. By using the natural shade and shelter of twelve-foot high walls, crops were escalated and delayed, manipulating the seasons to provide sufficiency in a time before fridge-freezers. Against the harsh northside, lending further insulation, a row of potting sheds included a soil bay, pot store, covered areas and forcing houses. Facing south, red brick walls soaked the sun like a sponge by day, radiating warmth to espaliered fruit trees by night. A giant boiler heated tropical houses, melon beds, vineries and enough glass to cover everything from radishes to pineapples. On top of this, head gardeners needed to be expert florists, growing and presenting year-round displays, from rose hedges across a banqueting table (preventing guests ‘rudely’ talking across it) to a glamorous corsage for the lady of the house to wear at a New Year’s Eve ball.
Dodson was Jennifer Davies’s dream presenter. Retired from estate service, he still lived in his cottage, working a section of the site as a market garden but, advancing in years and working alone, he could not manage the rest and it had fallen into decay. For the restoration, paths were reinstated, the old glasshouses given a lick of paint and cold frames re-glazed where necessary. Correct restoration of such frail buildings, even then, would have been financially prohibitive. BBC budgets didn’t stretch to the workforce nineteenth century estates would have commanded, either. Dodson was granted one ‘apprentice’: ever-willing Alison McKenzie, who got to speak about as often as a Victorian apprentice would have been allowed. Today she’d be given a video diary, blog and podcast.
Davies teamed Dodson with a narrator who understood kitchen gardening at a profound level. Peter Thoday, also the son of a head gardener, and a lecturer at the University of Bath, had a fascination for the history of vegetable cultivation; in the 1980s a distinctly unsexy subject. Thoday’s wistful commentary would occasionally switch to an excited chuckle, perhaps when the pair managed to track down a particularly obscure packet of seeds or learnt the exact use of an obsolete implement. At times they gave the distinct impression of two small boys playing in a mud bath.
Now faded to an almost monochrome pallor on DVD, the finished product is not always an easy watch. Dodson’s dignified charisma, Thoday’s boyish charm and Alison’s shy smile glimmer through the aspic of soft ‘80s sunshine, layering nostalgia upon nostalgia. Paul Reade’s haunting clarinet score lends a heart-breaking melancholy to this resurrected paradise, reminding us that the clock ticks on. Time-lapse photography in the opening credits speeds through the seasons like an out of control time-machine; equal parts spring awakening and memento mori. We watch The Victorian Kitchen Garden with a lump in our throats, yet we must watch.
Harry Dodson’s barely-contained excitement at his beloved garden’s recreation is infectious. ‘I know there’s going to be some frustrations,’ he admits in the first episode, then, with a slight catch in his voice, adds ‘but there will also be great joy.’ He remembers the good old days: eleven thousand square feet of glasshouse, three thousand square feet of frames, five hundred yards of cloches, plus four peach houses, four melon houses, a rose house, tropical house, a carnation house and a show house reserved for spectacular specimens. ‘A very useful amount of glass’, reflects the quietly spoken master of understatement.
Dodson replants box hedges, renews gravel paths, double-digs soil ‘like a billiard table’ and sprays fruit with some of the least environmentally friendly products known to humanity. A rabbit’s foot, ‘passed down the ages’ pollinates peaches, strawberries, nectarines and apricots. The old boiler house is shown ‘as seen’; tore it up could have blown the entire ?lm crew to Mars.
Harry demonstrates the creation of hot beds using manure from the stables, and methods of forcing everything from strawberries to potatoes, asparagus to chicory. The viewer is taken through a veritable museum of tools: grape-thinners, cucumber straighteners, India-rubber hoses, along with elderly terracotta pots with names like Long Tom and Thumbs. Harry uses such vessels to start off what he calls his ‘fussy pieces’, unusual crops demanding particular attention, though in the old days he would rarely have tasted such wonders himself. This may not have been all bad, we reflect, as he boils up home-made pest control beyond an executioner’s fantasy, most of which seems to be based on nicotine, paraffin and different colours of lead. Commercial chemicals include Paris Green, a highly toxic pesticide that sparkles like emeralds, originally used to kill rats in the Paris sewers and as lethal as it is beautiful.
Ancient fruit cordons are lovingly coaxed back into service, exploring techniques already outdated when Victoria ascended the throne and proving how inventions as simple as wire revolutionised gardening. Planting new cordons of what we would today call heirloom fruit varieties, Harry revealed how gardeners kept trees manageable in days before dwarf rooting stocks.
Foreshadowing Time Team and experimental archaeologists like Ruth Goodman and Peter Ginn, this bittersweet journey into the past was the ultimate nostalgia binge, yet was never mawkish. Harry had been there,
really been there – years of serious graft are etched on his face – and we know it wasn’t all arcadia. Wages were low, hours were long, work was hard, and a bad crop signalled hunger for all.
We ache with Dodson as his non-winter-hardy heritage broccolii decimated by frost; we keen with him as pigeons feast their way through his entire crop of cabbages. We peer with him through rain-splattered glass, knowing Cook is beginning to kick up, the cauliflower must go in, yet the ground remains determinedly waterlogged.
Through the heartache, hope shines. ‘Here’s a nice quiet, steady job’, Harry announces as Alison creates yards of hay-rope to blanch cardoons, using an improvised ‘wimble’. In that single phrase, he sums up why The Victorian Kitchen Garden was such a mighty success. Nice, quiet and steady and, at the end of the day, a job done.
The walled garden at Leverton had been, at least in part, reborn. It wasn’t a studio set; it wasn’t a television-garden-from-scratch, it was genuine. ‘The real thing is here and it will be here tomorrow because Harry will be here watering it’, said Peter Thoday, speaking in 2002. And so it was, for a while.
Part Two in HORTUS 126 will return to the rolling hills of the north Wessex Downs, to Leverton itself, to discover how this hauntingly beautiful walled Eden fared. For now, though, locate a copy of the DVD, put up your feet and make a tender foray into a gentle televisual jewel that kick-started a horticultural revolution.
The Victorian Kitchen Garden
PART TWO: CHILTON REVISITED
SANDRA LAWRENCE
Clever photography in The Victorian Kitchen Garden hides two secrets. The first is splendid: Chilton Foliat, the country estate used for the BBC’s classic 1987 experiment, which recreated a traditional walled garden under the benevolent eye of retired head gardener Harry Dodson, actually boasts two walled gardens, one butting against the other. The second, well, let’s park that one for now…
In many ways the story of the Chilton estate, near Hungerford, is a familiar one. Starting life as a sixteenth-century Wiltshire hunting lodge it enjoyed various owners and was remodelled twice, once by Sir John Soane. It even shifted county by edging a few feet east into Berkshire when the current Palladian style mansion, designed by William Pilkington, was built in 1800. The Gardener magazine wasn’t wild about the new house, describing it in 1834 as ‘a cube in the modern manner with rather modest earthworks round it’. The gardener’s house, on the other hand ‘has a much finer aspect’. No expense was spared in the double walled garden, with hot houses, pineapple lights, cold frames and show houses, all heated by a state of the art boiler, much admired by The Gardener.
The Victorian age was not, however, a happy time for the house, constantly bought, sold and remodelled until one particularly free spending owner died after a massive building spree, leaving large debts.
‘My great granny was American,’ says Sarah Scrope, current owner of Chilton. ‘Her father was the American ambassador in the run-up to the First World War.’ In 1908 the ambassador’s daughter married John Ward, younger son of the Earl of Dudley. Chilton was her parents’ wedding present. The couple also purchased an estate in Scotland, to which Harry Dodson would later send trays of beautifully packed fruit and veg, and a house in Monte Carlo. ‘He used to send white peaches – from here to Monte Carlo – can you believe it?’
Sir John Ward died in 1938. War was looming. Lady Ward handed over the estate to American soldiers, lived in London and worked for the war effort. Afterwards, back at Chilton, things would never quite be the same. She did, however, acquire a new head gardener.
‘Mr Dodson started here in 1947. He talked very fondly of my great granny,’ says Sarah. ‘He spoke of her walking through the shrubbery. She had a whistle; when Mr Dodson heard the whistle he knew that was the moment to go back to the walled garden…’‘…and put his jacket on,’ adds Sarah’s husband, Adrian.
Chilton’s walled garden, however, reflected a general post-war decline across Britain’s country estates. Dodson was in charge of less than half the workforce the gardens had enjoyed in the 1930s. Mechanisation, cheap imports, fewer mouths to feed and the gradual breakdown of the rural way of life were taking their toll. Lady Ward died in the early 1960s and while Chilton avoided the fate of many a country house, razed to smithereens in that decade, the frosty wind of change was blowing and the rising price of oil wasn’t going to heat those greenhouses. To all this was added a family tragedy.
‘My granny sadly died in a car accident,’ says Sarah. ‘When she died the interest from the main house faded. My grandfather, who had been injured in the crash, didn’t have the big house parties or the other things that were much more part of life before then. His interest and pride in the walled garden never waned but gone were the days when it was affordable or justifiable to have a whacking great three-acre walled garden supplying two houses. Whenever he had a houseful we would all wander down there and Mr Dodson would give a lovely conducted tour, looking smart in his suit and tie’. Harry Dodson was, by now, nearing retirement. ‘Sarah’s father gave him a lifetime tenancy of the walled gardens, the orchard, the potting sheds and the gardener’s cottage,’ says Adrian Scrope. ‘The understanding was that he continue to supply flowers, fruit and veg to the main house’.
Alone, Dodson worked as much of the garden as he could manage. The rest slowly mouldered into slumber. Wooden greenhouses rotted, ironwork rusted, brickwork flaked.
‘The BBC really rather rescued it,’ remembers Sarah. ‘It was tremendously exciting; we were all absolutely cock-a-hoop. They smartened it up and gave it great purpose again.’
And now we come to that second secret hidden by those television cameras. The ‘purpose’ was real enough, but sadly the ‘smartening-up’ was superficial; ‘tidying up’, as Sarah describes it. Most of the series was filmed in Chilton’s smaller, west walled garden where there was still a full range of buildings. Beautifully ‘restored’ in the series they received, in reality, a lick of paint and a promise. ‘If you looked analytically at the footage you’d probably see quite a lot of it wasn’t stable,’ says Adrian. ‘Mr Dodson only worked in the greenhouse on non-windy days. It literally waved in the wind.’
However wobbly the stage set, the show was fantastic. ‘I remember this pineapple being grown,’ says Sarah. ‘It caused rejoicing along the valley. I have this charming picture of my grandfather holding it as if it was a new-born baby.’
The TV circus left Chilton in the early 1990s, by which point the garden – and its charming, modest ringmaster – were getting on.
‘Mr Dodson got older and older,’ says Adrian. ‘The series finished, he carried on supplying friends and family with vegetables. When we came here in 1997 with two very small children he wanted to supply us. I said to him, in all humility, ‘Mr Dodson, we’re not Colonel and Mrs Ward, you must send us a proper bill’. He looked at me with his beady eye and said ‘Yes I will’. I asked ‘How often are you going to send us a bill?’ He said ‘I am in the habit of sending them out quarterly’. I teased him and said ‘Oh, Mr Dodson, nobody does that any longer, you must send a bill at least once a month’. He just looked at me and said ‘I’ll let you know if I run short’. It was a sweet put-down, him at his most charming. He was an adorable man; though,’ Adrian adds wryly, ‘his driving got more and more erratic . . .’
‘Unbelievably beautiful boxes of fruit and veg would appear on a Friday,’ says Sarah, ‘along with houseplants, cyclamen, paper-whites, hyacinths. We would, very occasionally, get this laboriously handwritten bill for next to nothing. I don’t know what his basis of charging was.’
Even at this point, the Scropes, who had recently moved into the also ailing main house, did not realise the true state into which the gardens had fallen. ‘We had other priorities at that point,’ admits Adrian.
Fiercely independent, Dodson never asked for help, despite the fact he could have used some. He retreated into the smaller, west garden, leaving the eastern side to wilderness. ‘It was difficult for us because he had a life tenancy and it was his area,’ remembers Adrian.
The family were able to tactfully help around the edges. ‘The yew hedging was twelve feet high; all the apple trees were leaning over,’ says Adrian. ‘One Christmas the estate team and I cleared the whole thing and reinstated the orchard.’
‘Mr Dodson was rather thrilled to see all those trees again,’ says Sarah. ‘The following spring the most amazing snowdrops came up; then daffodils.’
‘He told me the mammoth growth that almost closed off the path was actually a nuttery, with filberts and hazels,’ adds Adrian. ‘He told me exactly what to do. We absolutely hammered them and they’ve come back beautifully. We coppice them, for bank restoration on the river.’
Harry Dodson died in 2005 at the age of eighty-five, ‘a sad end to an era.’ It was only then that the full condition of the garden became apparent. ‘The buildings were in a terrible state,’ says Adrian. ‘As Mr Dodson got older he wasn’t able to maintain them. I photographed them, as they were, so we’ve got a historical record.’
There was no saving them, though. Rotten to the core, their brickwork blown, they were not only beyond repair, but dangerous. The Scropes saved what they could, including twelve thousand bricks, later used for repairs, but had to look to the future.
Economics have ever been the lynchpin upon which a country estate works. It isn’t just there for show; it must pay its way. The challenge is to find that way, to make a nineteenth century concept relevant in the twenty-first.
‘It was just after the crash,’ remembers Adrian, ‘a lot of people were leaving or being fired by the big companies and starting on their own. We subconsciously tapped into people wanting little business units.’
They tackled first a small courtyard. Once a ‘model farm’, it would have showcased the best of the Victorian estate: the finest cow, the best pig, a well-groomed pony. ‘We brought it up to modern specifications, buried the services and restored the roofs.’ Hand-picked local businesses, from photographers to curtain makers now rent space in neat, beautifully restored garden buildings. In 2013 Harry Dodson’s potting sheds began a similar transformation. Former mushroom houses, pot stores and tool rooms are blinking into modern daylight, though not without their nostalgic moments. ‘We found these big hampers with “Chilton” written on the side,’ says Adrian. ‘They used to go up on the early morning train to Belgrave Square two or three times a week. Unfortunately, by the time we took over you could literally stick your fingers through them.’
There are some pleasant surprises. One building that might reasonably have been expected to collapse is in excellent condition, having been recently restored. The apple store, star of autumn VKG episodes, is an extremely rare piece of horticultural history. Entirely thatched, roof and walls alike, it was lined with cork to keep it at a constant 40°F. Slatted shelves preserved fruit for the dark months and beyond. Today they guard some of Harry Dodson’s prized tools and gadgets in the hope that one day a museum might be possible. Sarah and Adrian have donated all records pertaining to the history of the walled garden, including Harry Dodson’s papers and reports, to the Royal Horticultural Society, which are being conserved.
The big problem was the walled garden. On television, tidying-up and an imaginative cameraman had fooled us into thinking all would be happy ever after. In truth, the garden was fading even as the series was airing. For a while a tenant farmed it commercially as a market garden. What remained of the buildings, now mainly demolished, was ‘flapping plastic, bits of concrete and leaking water pipes’. Then even that came to an end.
‘Kind people would come along and say “I’ve had a brilliant idea for the walled gardens”,’ says Sarah. ‘They’d say “let’s have caravans or Christmas trees or weddings” – but none of it stacked up.’
‘About five years ago a lovely lady knocked on the door. She said “I am a florist in Hungerford and we buy all our cut flowers from Holland. Is there any chance you’ve got anywhere we could grow them?”’ We almost threw the walled garden at her. She developed it and got about an acre under cultivation. We wanted to weep with joy because it was flowers; there was a horticultural purpose to it again.
Recently, ill health has prevented the florist from continuing. Happily, the gardener who looks after what Harry Dodson used to call ‘the pleasure grounds’ cannot bear to think of the walled garden once more returning to slumber and is continuing the project.
Chilton’s walled garden is slowly returning to life yet again. Espaliered apples and pears hang heavy with superb fruit. Neat rows of show-quality dahlias, sunflowers and other cutting varieties are as colourful as anything in the BBC’s follow up series The Victorian Flower Garden; a polytunnel provides a practical alternative to the acres of glass the site once boasted. A gigantic circular tank collects rainwater. A long, wrought iron arched tunnel is cleared, ready for climbers. ‘The only remaining building is the fig house’, admits Adrian, a note of regret in his voice. ‘We’ve had to take all the glass out.’ The incumbent fig, released from the constraints of Harry’s pruning scissors, bursts joyfully through, relishing the soft Berkshire climate. Slowly, forays are being made into the part that remains uncultivated. Uncultivated, that is, not untidy – each neatly mown section of grass patiently awaits its Cinderella transformation.
‘What’s wonderful is that there is a developing horticultural business here,’ says Adrian. ‘I very much doubt it’s ever going to earn the estate any money but it’s keeping the tradition going, it’s not costing us anything and it’s a pleasure to see.
’Now, here I have to make a confession. I didn’t get to see the famous west garden, revived for the television cameras, despite my being just yards away from it.
Mr Dodson’s bothy, often glimpsed in the series, was tumbling down around him. ‘He was of that generation that would never ask for anything,’ says Adrian. ‘We didn’t feel we had the right to go in because it was his for life. I went into the house one day, which I did very, very rarely, and he had a pair of pliers he was turning the kitchen tap on with.’ The cottage was, after Harry’s death, rebuilt and is now let to private tenants. ‘We call it the Garden House and it has a one-acre walled garden,’ says Sarah.
This, at last, then, is the walled garden of the television series, tantalisingly still walled and beyond public gaze. ‘It’s tidy,’ Sarah reassures me, ‘the fruit trees are pinned against the wall and it’s mostly grass.
’The fortunes of the original Victorian Kitchen Garden have waxed and waned, and now wax again. For Sarah Scrope especially, the series, its garden and, especially, its star hold a very personal claim on the heart. ‘Everybody adored Mr Dodson,’ she says. ‘I must watch it again though I’d probably sob my way through it.’
‘What chuffs us is that there are now lots of people here,’ says Adrian. ‘In the past, including farm workers and domestic staff, there were probably a hundred and fifty people on the estate. By the 1970s there were, maybe, twenty. We did a rough calculation and there are now about a hundred working within the boundaries.’
There are no plans to return the walled gardens at Leverton to their original, high-Victorian, high-maintenance glamour, but the gardens it inspired flourish the length of the country. My third and final article will look at the massive horticultural, historical – and touristic – legacy bequeathed by The Victorian Kitchen Garden.
