Context 163 - March 2020

C O N T E X T 1 6 3 : M A R C H 2 0 2 0 41 gardeners’ entrances were plainer, and often in the north or east walls). C Straight paths (dividing the planted areas into practical square or rectangles known as quarters). D Dipping pond or well (often at the centre of the garden), a practical and ornamental feature. E Perimeter borders (allowing space for fruit trees to be trained on both sides of the walls). F Glasshouses (built on south-facing walls for maximum sunlight and heated from a boiler housed on the outside of the wall). G Slips or slip gardens (cultivated areas just outside the walled garden which were used for hardier fruit and vegetables). H Orientation (an aspect slightly to the east of due south protected fruit blossom from thawing too quickly in the morning). I Potting sheds (outbuildings, often built against the outside of the northern wall, might include seed and fruit stores, workshops, and bothies for unmarried gardeners). J Frameyard (generally to the north of the walled garden), an area for cold frames, glass- houses for propagating and hot beds for forcing plants into early growth. Most of these features can still be found at Osborne in East Cowes, a late-18th-century walled kitchen garden embellished by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, who bought the Osborne estate in 1845 as their seaside fam- ily home. They raised the walls and reused the portico from the old house as the main garden entrance. The Queen’s journal records her chil- dren picking gooseberries and raspberries ‘to their heart’s content’. Since 1984 the Osborne Estate has been man- aged on behalf of the nation by English Heritage, and it is included on the Register of Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest in England at Grade II*. The kitchen garden, with path layout and 1854 glasshouses retained, was restored in 2000 and laid out with a new design of beds and arbours of fruit, vegetables and flowers. As a tourist attraction, complete with topiary pigs in the pigsty, the future of the Osborne garden seemed assured. Other walled gardens, without royal connec- tions, had not fared so well. As Susan Campbell has written, until very recently they had tended to be neglected like the disgraced member of an otherwise thriving family. Appuldurcombe was first included on the register at Grade II in 1987 but the 1779 walled kitchen garden, part of Capability Brown’s improvements, was included within a revised boundary only in 2015. At 45 sites it was discovered that either no evidence or only fragments remained. One short length of wall was left as a feature in an East Cowes supermarket forecourt – possibly better than nothing? A further 19 sites still had walls but had been developed, mostly for single or multiple dwellings in the second half of the 20th century. One Victorian villa garden had been in use as a scrap-metal works since the early 1970s and at Appuldurcombe a market garden had been replaced by holiday park caravans. At East Dene in Ventnor (the childhood home of the poet Algernon Swinburne) the estate was divided in 1949 and the 0.43-hectare walled kitchen garden became a market garden special- ising in strawberries. The garden slopes down to the south, giving glorious sea views, and the northern apse wall, a unique feature on the island, has evidence of a sheltered fruit wall. In 2014 the poly-tunnels for strawberries were gone and only a very small area was in cultivation. The Hermitage in Godshill (a local list site) was also a market garden in the later 20th cen- tury, but by the time of a group visit in 2014 it was head high with brambles and nettles. Market gardening is at first an appealing new use, but it seems to be no longer commercially viable at a small scale. The future of this walled kitchen garden is uncertain. Osborne House: an extract from the 1864 25-inch Ordnance Survey, with most of the typical features of a walled kitchen garden East Dene: the large early 19th-century garden with unusual extended apsidal northern wall is seen here in the later 20th century, when it was used as a market garden with polytunnels for growing strawberries (Photo: Mark Saunders)