Country diary: A paradise inside four walls
Any garden is a special thing, but a walled garden? That's something truly special: an outside that is an inside. When Tara Fraser and Nigel Jones first came to view this semi-derelict Regency house in 2016, they had no idea Ashley Court included a walled garden. 'We saw this wooden door and pushed it open – and there it was. Just like The Secret Garden. Total jungle.'
Nine summers and countless hours of labour later, and it is transformed. Nigel opens the door; I follow him and have to stop at the threshold as I catch sight of it.
The garden is Tardis-like, bigger on the inside somehow, and bounded by high walls – stone on the outside and lined with brick – in a loose squareish shape that undulates with the lift and dip of the land. The veg beds and paths give it the feel of a patchwork coverlet laid over a sleeping giant.
'No self-respecting Victorian kitchen garden would be so ridiculously slopey,' saya Tara. It's one of the reasons why they believe the garden predates the house to before the 1800s.
Not only do the high walls act as a physical barrier against deer and rabbits, they retain the heat and shelter the plants from the wind, such that the garden sits in its own microclimate. In winter, the cold air can escape through a rectangular frost window at the lower end (it pours out, apparently, like a white ghost, into the surrounding woodland).
Hard to imagine on a day like this, with bees and demoiselles zipping about, buttercups shining, bathed in warm spring sunshine. Beans have begun spiralling their way up bamboo wigwams, gooseberries are as hard as marbles but growing plumper, more translucent every day. Ancient espaliered pear trees reach out to each other with gnarled fingers. Clumps of chives have gone to flower, their purple tufted hairdos like something out of Dr Seuss.
Filled with all of these photosynthesisers feasting on the sun, this garden really is paradise. The word itself comes from the Avestan word pairidaēza, meaning walled enclosure. How fitting that the walled garden is both how we imagine heaven, and the very place on earth where that image took root.
Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian's Country Diary, 2018-2024 is published by Guardian Faber; order at guardianbookshop.com and get a 15% discount
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