The Curious History of Vegetables E-Book

Bill Laws

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 268

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2006

Beschreibung

Couch potatoes are idlers, cabbageheads are dunces, swede-bashers are stupid and you may as well give up life if you become a vegetable. A vegetable existence may imply dull monotony, but the humble vegetable has sparked protests, threatened to topple a British government and almost triggered a revolution. From the Scottish Presbyterian campaign against the 'sinful potato' to the class act that turned the carrot into a propaganda tool, from garlic inscriptions on Egyptian pyramids to Neolithic broad beans and medieval cabbage, and from the Dig for Victory campaign to competitive vegetable growing, The Curious History of Vegetables highlights just how vital our produce really is.

Leseprobe

Cover illustration: istockphoto.com/Elena Chiplak

First published 2006 as Spade, Skirret and Parsnip

This updated paperback edition first published 2024

The History Press

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Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

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© Bill Laws, 2006, 2024

The right of Bill Laws to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 75095 907 0

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Limited, Padstow, Cornwall

Contents

Gardening Mirrors Life: Foreword by Henrietta Green

The Kitchen Garden

1 Vegetable Husbandry

The Origins of the Kitchen Garden

Top Five Favourite Vegetable Seeds

Boundaries, Walls and Fences

A Good Idea at the Time: Blanching

Muck and Magic

The Compost Heap

John Innes’ Revolutionary Potting Compost

Vegetable Divas

Rudolph Steiner’s Biodynamic Vegetables

Fabulous Kitchen Gardens

2 Tools, Potting and Pests

The Kitchen Gardener

Spade, Hoe and Hook

How Big is My Garden?

Under Glass

The Potting Shed

Pest Control

Mr Henry Doubleday’s Solution

The Slug and Snail War

3 Origins and Losses

A Vegetable Timeline

Top Five World’s Oldest Vegetables

Out of the East

Out of India

Out of Rome

Out of America

Out in the Cold

What’s in a Name?

A Good Idea at the Time: Container Gardening

The Secret of Selling Seeds

Carl Linnaeus and the Classification of Vegetables

John Loudon’s Cultivation Advice for ‘Practical Men’

4 Vegetable Bounty

A Vegetable Herbal

Popeye the Spinach Man

Top Five Vegetable Aphrodisiacs

The Vegetarian Movement

To Market

London’s Larder

A Good Idea at the Time: The Onion Seller

Vegetables Preserved

A Good Idea at the Time: The Ice House

A Vegetable Calendar

5 Vegetable Passions

The Political Potato

Top Five Nations Growing Potatoes

War-Winning Vegetables

Recipe for a Good Life

Allotments for All

Vegetable Radicals

The Biggest is the Best?

Artists and their Kitchen Gardens

Further Reading

Acknowledgements

Gardening Mirrors LifeForeword by Henrietta Green

Vegetable gardening came comparatively late into my life. If truth be told, no gardening – vegetable or otherwise – figured until, in pursuit of the rural idyll, I moved to Gloucestershire.

London was where I misspent my childhood. Blessed with a large garden, I whiled away hour after hour playing with my Scottie dog Kim or, later on, flirting with my next-door neighbour while he fed his chickens – and yes, he did keep hens and an excessively cock-a-doodling cock in the poshest part of St John’s Wood. Gardening was something done by a stream of gardeners.

Even though I never once saw my mother cook a meal, I have enjoyed a happy career as a food writer. Equally, even though I never saw either of my parents wield so much as a pair of secateurs, it has not prevented me from embracing gardening with all the passion of a late convert.

In The Curious History of Vegetables, Bill Laws makes me realise what a fascinating pastime I have latterly adopted. With all its irritations, foibles, triumphs and disappointments, gardening mirrors life. Vegetables were the staff of life and, just as snobbery existed in the world at large, so it did in the kitchen garden. Imagine the pressure on the ‘gentleman’s gardener’ who not only had to grow the right vegetables but had to get them to the table at the right time, preferably long before ‘poor people even think of such a thing.’

By celebrating our history of vegetables, Bill Laws highlights the facts and foibles for our pleasure and edification. He certainly – if you will forgive the pun – knows his onions. The Curious History of Vegetables is a charming read, written with authority, a gentle humour and a superb feel for detail. So next time you get your spade from the shed to dig ‘the plot’, you may be reassured to know that you are merely one in a long line of vegetable fanatics.

Henrietta Green

The Kitchen Garden

According to Rudyard Kipling the caretaker of the vegetable plot was a patient soul who was to be seen ‘grubbing weeds from gravel paths with broken kitchen-knives’. And yet, according to Beatrix Potter and P.G. Wodehouse who each created their own curmudgeonly kitchen gardener apparently based on real-life Victorian or Edwardian gardeners, the vegetable gardener was a tyrant. Yet most of us find the vegetable garden to be that quiet, contemplative sanctuary that Thomas Jefferson enjoyed: ‘I have lived temperately, eating little animal food, and that … as a condiment for the vegetables, which constitute my principal diet,’ he explained in 1819.

The kitchen garden is a place to which, like Diocletian, we retire. It is a place of bottom gardens, allotments and potting sheds. It is also a place of quirky and curious revelations. Its tool sheds have been filled with the boys’ toys of the garden since at least Queen Victoria’s reign, plundered by disgruntled citizens during times of conflict, and raided by at least one poisoner who later met his fate on the gallows. But the potting shed, too, has been a place of retreat – and a base from which to wage war on garden pests especially those celebrated enemies, slugs and snails, which have come in for a range of treatments from the bizarre to the benign.

To make the most of vegetables, they should be eaten as fresh as possible – nothing equals the crispness of home-grown vegetables. However, the trade in fruit and veg is a brisk and lucrative one; the greengrocery or produce aisle is the most profitable one in the supermarket. A business, which was once the slow trade of the costermonger, has developed into a global market where the distance between field and fork has grown to many thousands of air miles. The key to this expanding market is to pick it quick and keep it cool: the business of preserving vegetables has a strange past – and no more so than when it involved Bob Birdseye’s discoveries during his days as a fur trapper in Labrador.

The vegetable garden has a long timeline and a curious history, quite as compelling as that of any formal garden. And with world famous kitchen gardens such as Monticello, the home of the American president Thomas Jefferson, in Virginia; Heligan in Cornwall; Winston Churchill’s Chartwell in Kent; and Villandry in France, home grown vegetables have become as fashionable as they are fresh.

Contenders for the prize of the world’s oldest vegetable include the pea, the lettuce and the bean, while the award for world’s most versatile vegetable should, by rights, go to a fruit you can eat, serve food on, and wash with: the squash. When vegetable plots needed to be measured out, standards were set both by the pyramid-building Egyptians and, in the Middle Ages, by the feet of the first sixteen people to leave the village church. Indeed, if it were not for vegetables, the world as we know it today would not exist: both the Spanish and American nations were hot housed on a nutritious, protein-rich diet of maize – cultivated in Mexico around 2,500 years ago, maize is a relative newcomer to the European kitchen garden.

In the beginning was the seed. The traffic in vegetable seeds and the methods of marketing them range from a Shenandoah country and western radio station to modern podcasts and earnest blogs. Coming up with a universal classification for all those seeds and plants fell to Carl Linnaeus and his unfortunate friend Artedi. Linnaeus proved to be as successful as that clever London couple, Mr and Mrs Loudon, who taught the middle classes of the 1800s everything they needed to know about the vegetable.

Vegetable growing comes down to good husbandry, good fences and good, fertile soil. But the kitchen gardener is an anxious soul and inclined to welcome any idea, however eccentric, that might help him or her succeed. The down-to-earth approach works well enough, but over the centuries gardeners have tried some eccentric methods of raising vegetables, from following the moon’s quarters to speaking encouraging words to their plants. Painters and clerics, poets and politicians are among those who have sometimes taken their vegetables too seriously. There was the Suffolk clergyman who was convinced that growing vegetables would reduce street crime; and the garden correspondent who claimed that eating potatoes led to verbosity; the American president Woodrow Wilson believed that raising vegetables would cure citizens of their ‘extravagant and wasteful’ ways while the Victorian critic John Ruskin thought that growing vegetables would better your position in society – and hopefully improve your table manners. The French artist Claude Monet regularly broke from painting another set of water lilies at Giverny to check progress in his kitchen garden next door. And there are those historians who remain convinced that the Roman Empire would have survived if its emperor Diocletian had remained at his post in Rome instead of taking early retirement to grow cabbages at his Illyrian palace. ‘Could you but see the vegetables I have raised,’ he enthused to a friend even as the empire descended into civil war.

It was these same conquering Italians who gave us the word vegetable from vegere, to grow, to animate and to enliven, and the vegetable has continued to inspire ever since. People have grown vegetables in protest against a range of foes from wealthy landowners and multinationals to American military powers. Others, including the Protestants of northern Europe, refused to engage with the potato on religious grounds. The last two world wars led to an understandable passion to Dig for Victory and it was said that home-grown vegetables had rescued Britain from the blockade by German submarines in World War Two: Tuber über Alles, mocked one Punch cartoonist. And curiously the British people were never so healthy, nor their allotments so full, as they were by the end of the war in 1945.

Emperor Tiberius, John Innes, John Loudon, Rudolph Steiner, Henry Doubleday, Lawrence D. Hills and Popeye: history is full of people with a passion for vegetables. The following forty-eight stories explore that passion – and the curious history of the vegetable from the medieval monastic garden to the full-on frenzy of Covent Garden in its hey day; from the cathedral-like peace of the walled kitchen garden to the bitter battles of the allotment campaigners; from the muck and magic of the organic gardener to the mysteries of compost.

1

Vegetable Husbandry

The Origins of the Kitchen Garden

Top Five Favourite Vegetable Seeds

Boundaries, Walls and Fences

A Good Idea at the Time: Blanching

Muck and Magic

The Compost Heap

John Innes’ Revolutionary Potting Compost

Vegetable Divas

Rudolph Steiner’s Biodynamic Vegetables

Fabulous Kitchen Gardens

THE ORIGINS OF THE KITCHEN GARDEN

The kitchen garden, as essential to the well-being of a Palestinian household a thousand years ago as it was to an allotment holder in Pontefract a century ago, has a long, if obscure history. Garden historians tend to celebrate the pleasure grounds and paradise plots of the wealthy rather than those of their lesser yeomen. It does not help that classical writers stayed largely silent on the subject of the vegetable plot. Yet the antiquity of the kitchen garden is incontestable and many still lie, like a host of Heligans, awaiting rediscovery.

In medieval times there was a lexicon of Latin, French and English names for garden places including gardinium, hortus, herbarium, viridium, virgultum and vergier. There was a wyrtyard, or little park, and a herber, a small ornamental garden with a lawn of less than 1 acre. The medieval kitchen garden was a curtilage, leac-garth or leac-tun from the Anglo Saxon for geard, tun or zeard meaning a yard or enclosure – this was the ‘backyard’ that the Elizabethan settlers carried with them to the Americas.

The common root for the word giardino in Italian, jardin in French, and garten in German, is the Old English geard or garth, an enclosed place or yard. The first mention of a ketchyngardyn or kechengardyn in Britain appears in the manorial accounts of the Bishop of London in the 1300s. Up until then Europeans kept silent on the subject. The peasant, footstool of the manorial system and mainstay of the medieval economy, had neither the time, skills nor inclination to record anything about his or her methods of growing for the pot. Yet the talents of the peasant gardener ensured that the pottage, a boiled cauldron of vege­tables and, occasionally, meat, kept their families alive.

Early European kitchen gardens were little lifelines, fertile plots dedicated to growing the basic necessities. In villages and hamlets across the continent the kitchen garden hugged the house or stood, encircled by earth banks, ditches and stockades, between the cottages and the fields. On the mirey clays of Burgundy or down on the Somerset levels of western England village gardens were raised up above the flood plain and set upon islands surrounded by drainage dykes and the deep, muddy tracks that marked out their boundaries. Ditches, pools and pig wallows were an intrinsic and practical part of the country scene since they manured the ground and watered the vegetables. Unfortunately, they regularly swallowed up the young too. Barbara Hanawalt in The Ties That Bound reports that: ‘On 29 May 1270 Cicely, aged 2 and a half, went into the yard: a small pig came and tried to take bread from her hand. She fell into a ditch and was drowned.’

Although storable winter staples such as vetches and beans might be sown in strips alongside the orchard where the cutting hay and animal pasture grew, the kitchen garden kept to its conventional ‘quarters’. Quartered by a cross of paths, this four-square pattern, edged perhaps with low, clipped hedges of yew, juniper, lavender or dwarf box, was as much part of the kitchen garden scene in ancient Persia as it was to the new Elizabethans of the 1950s growing vegetables in their post-war Surrey suburbs.

Back in Roman times Pliny had already worked out that digging over the ‘quarters’ of a plot of two-thirds of an acre to a depth of 3ft took eight men a day. But we must wait until 820 before some monk saw fit to commit to parchment the design of a European kitchen garden. This was at the Benedictine abbey of St Gall in Switzerland where the hortus measured a tenth of an acre (404 sq. m) and the different esculents were grown in 5.4m-long rectangular beds each 6m by 1.5m wide.

The Benedictine orders (the Black Monks), the later Cistercians (the White Monks) and Augustinians were as closely wedded to their gardens as they were to their God. Monasteries were centred on the cloistered garth, a patch of grass kept as neat as a bowling green not least because the colour green, as the twelfth-century French prior Hugh of Fouilly put it, ‘nourishes the eyes and preserves their vision’. Close by would be the physic garden filled with medicinal plants; a small, locked poison garden where narcotics such as opium poppies, hemlock and mandrake were grown; and the orchard cemetery, a pleasant place for a burial with its air of quiet contemplation and sanctuary.

Finally there was the utilitarian kitchen or cellarer’s garden run to the very best of their abilities by a grumbling friar or nun. The Italian Christian St Benedict advised his followers to keep an open house for travellers and to tend the sick and needy. Their peasants paid their tax, a tithe or tenth of his produce, to the clergy. The tax, which was based not only on the field crops and animals, but also the produce of the ‘foot-dug’ garden, supported the local monastery which served as motel, college, roadside diner, citizen advice bureau and hospital, complete with accident and emergency department. Never sure how many guests might be taking bed and board (the board was literally the supper table) and supping at the monastery that evening, the cellarer needed to keep abreast of the latest developments in the cultivation and storage of their esculents.

A cellarer’s garden recreated in the monastic gardens of Shrewsbury and designed by the late Sylvia Landsberg serves to show what the monk Brother Cadfael might have grown. Cadfael, the fictional creation of English author Edith Pargeter (writing as Ellis Peters), was an enthusiastic gardener and herbalist who, like his real ancestors, had gained useful knowledge of the apothecary’s art from his travels in the Holy Land. Traditional plots of 1.2m-wide beds were surrounded by 0.6m paths where coleworts, onions, leeks, leaf beet and broad beans were taken to be eaten green. Nitrogen-restoring legumes were an especially useful crop.

Salad, leek and colewort seedlings grew in the nursery bed while the useful fennel, mint, wormwood and hyssop were sown nearby. These last were all good ‘strewing’ plants for spreading on the floors like some medieval air freshener. Cadfael would also have ensured there was a plentiful supply of flax for linen and bandages, and hemp for rope and sacking.

The kitchen garden was well stocked. In the 1500s the farmer poet Thomas Tusser, author of Five Hundred Pointes of Good Husbandrie, lists no less than 1200 plants for the housewife to grow and, while his records included medicinal plants, plants for strewing and scenting hand water and insecticidal plants to keep away the flies, there were plenty of vegetables for the pot. There were brassicas, usually colewort (a kind of cale) and cabbages for the wealthy; parsley, leeks, leaf beet, parsnips, turnips and skirrets; beans and peas, grown to be dried and eaten during the winter; garlic, chives, the ‘common bulb onion’ and a ‘green-leaved one’. In the salad bed the leaves, seeds or petals of a range of self seeding annuals such as borage, marigold, rocket, feverfew and poppy made as pretty a posy as they did when used to fill the salad bowl.

Around the beginning of the 1500s the English kitchen garden was revitalised by the arrival of around 50,000 French protestant Huguenots, fleeing religious persecution in northern Europe. Many of the Huguenots had lived in the Low Countries, in places like Flanders where the local gardeners customarily shipped fresh vegetables across the Channel to Britain. (Peas imported from Holland were reportedly ‘fit dainties for ladies, they come so far, and cost so dear’, complained one Mr Fuller.) When the Huguenots réfugiés themselves sailed for England they brought with them their superior glass and ropework technologies, and their expertise in fruit and vegetable growing. (One of their number, baby Augustine Courtauld, founder of what became the world’s largest textile company, arrived hidden in a basket of vegetables.) Herbs and salads, parsley and leaf beet, cucumbers and melons, mint and asparagus (cooked first then eaten cold) were soon growing happily alongside onions, nursery beds of tender young plants and groups of medicinal herbs.

By now Thomas Hill, writing under the curious pseudonym Didymus Mountain, was working on The Gardener’s Labyrinth, which was published posthumously in 1571. Hill had promised to reveal ‘worthy Secretes, about the particular sowing and remouing of the moste Kitchen Hearbes; with the wittie ordering of other daintie Hearbes, delectable Floures, pleasant Fruites, and fine Rootes, as the like hath not heretofore bin vttered of any.’ Hill advocated trenched beds, with 1ft-wide trenches on either side to water the beds. (This was not to be confused with the practice of ‘trenching’ or manuring vegetable beds by digging a deep trench and filling the bottom with manure.)

Well-drained paths were laid to separate the vegetable beds from flower borders filled with useful plants such as marigold, ox eye daisies, carnations and pinks. Intercropping was a useful practice, thought Thomas Hill, with broad beans, early dwarf and the later tall peas grown together, and strawberry runners, planted between rows of onions, being allowed to grow on for harvesting the following year, the onions having been lifted and stored in the autumn.

The kitchen garden, like the formal flower garden, was kept neat. Seed was sown in drills rather than broadcast or sown in patches. For the fastidious kitchen gardener there was the quincunx layout, a method of ‘planting in rows, by which the plants in the one row are always opposed to the blanks in the other, so that when a plot of ground is planted in this way, the plants appear in rows in four directions’.

For the time being the gardeners’ choice of vegetables was limited to what had been passed down from the Persians, Greeks, Romans, Christian and Christian academics – universities like Toledo, Cordoba, Bologna and Paris had all furthered the development of vegetables as had the great botanical gardens of Pisa, Padua, Parma and Florence. But the growing two-way trade with America was about to bring about an unparalleled transformation to the vegetable patch.

In America intercropping and companion planting was a well-established craft in the communal gardens of the native American people. Corn or maize was sown, after due ceremony and respectful rituals, and fertilised with whatever was available locally whether it was fish and wood ash or bat dung from neighbouring caves. Corn was followed by lima and kidney or pinto beans, the beans using the stems of the maize for support. Then it was the turn of the pumpkins, squashes and sunflowers (for oil) and Jerusalem artichokes (for their storable tubers). The ripening of the first cobs of corn was a cause for celebration and the cobs would be baked in the embers of the fire at the Green Corn Festival. Mature cobs from the later crops would be hung in ropes likes strings of onions and stored in the smoky rafters of the lodge.

The early European settlers were suspicious at first of South America’s maize, potatoes, tomatoes, peppers and yams and north America’s vegetable marrows, squash, pumpkins, Jerusalem artichokes and beans. But once they and their families had been saved from starvation by the native American crops, they extolled their vegetable virtues and sent the seed home to Europe. It was put to good use. Indian maize was so nutritious that it was said to be responsible for doubling the population of Spain in the 1700s. The potato did the same for the half-starved Irish people whose population rose from 3 million in 1750 to 8 million in 1845 before potato blight triggered the disastrous crop failures.

During the Industrial Age the kitchen garden underwent more radical reforms. Working men grew essential supplies on their allotments; the ‘villa’ gardener devoted the bottom of the garden to vegetables while those higher up the social scale poured thousands of pounds into prestigious and productive fruit and vegetable gardens. Snobbery was rife – even in the kitchen garden. ‘Let us begin with the earliest crops (of peas) which the cottagers seldom aims at; but which the gentleman’s gardener and the amateur must produce, so as to have them on the table long before poor people think of such a thing,’ recommended the Victorian gardener Shirley Hibberd (1825–1890). The cottager, amateur and gentleman’s gardener, who was generally a cottager in his spare time anyway and perfectly capable of raising early peas if he chose, might have every conceivable vegetable at his disposal, but he still had to contend with the seasons. The methods taken to manage the climate marked the next significant change in raising vegetables.

While market growers in the vales of Kent and Evesham concentrated on mass production, research and development fell to those earnest amateurs on their country estates, aided by armies of gardeners. It was no use relying on ‘Johnny Foreigner’: the prolific garden writer John Claudius Loudon (1783–1843), who viewed European gardeners with despair, explained: ‘Horticulture has made little progress in Italy. Forcing or prolonging crops is unknown; everything is sown at a certain season, and grows up, ripens, and perishes together. The red and white beet, salsify, scorzonera, chervil, sorrel, onion, shallot, Jerusalem artichoke, are in many parts unknown’, he declared.

It was left to the estate head gardeners to forward vegetable development, exchanging ideas and sharing their knowledge in popular publications such as Loudon’s own Gardener’s Magazine, Gardeners’ Chronicle and the Journal of Horticulture and Cottage Gardening.

Technological developments in iron and glass making, and the advancing science of the heating engineer, gave the Victorians the means to grown any and every vegetable – and send them to the table at almost any time of year. All that was required was money and people power. However, the rumble of canon fire on the battle fields of Flanders was about to bring it all to an end. The Duke of Devonshire’s 400-year-old estate at Chatsworth in Derbyshire was a case in point. The great house had been provisioned by a seven-acre kitchen garden aided, by 1905, by almost 2 acres of glass housing. In 1890 the gardeners were assembled for a group photograph in front of the Great Conservatory. There were forty-six of them. Their numbers had been halved by 1917 and shortly after the end of World War One the greenhouses were sold off and plans were drawn up to discontinue the kitchen garden altogether. Death duties, labour costs and, finally, the World War Two would see the greengrocer rather than the gardener provisioning these palaces of the Edwardian and Victorian age.

For the rest of the population, however, urbanisation and the industrial age had reduced city gardens to a fraction of their former selves and there was a saccharine nostalgia for old cottage gardens where radishes and runner beans grew among the roses. Yet amateur gardeners were still cropping vegetables where they could, on allotments or pinched plots of wasteland. People wanted proper gardens.

On the eve of the 1900s a parliamentary reporter and urban planner, Ebenezer Howard (1850–1928), had already given voice to their aspirations. Living in the country, he pointed out, brought ‘Beauty of Nature, Bright Sunshine and Abundance of Water’, but it was blighted by ‘Lack of Society, Trespassers Beware and Deserted Spirit.’ In town the benefits of ‘Opportunity, High Money Wages and Places of amusement’ had to be offset against ‘Closing Out of Nature, Foul Air, High Rents, and Slums and Palaces’. The perfect compromise, argued Howard, was a ‘garden city’, a place that combined town and country and which boasted ‘Beauty of Nature, Social Opportunity, and Fields and Parks of Easy Access, and Homes and gardens’. Howard’s reforming garden city ideas paved the way for an era of social housing with gardens and vegetable plots for all. Benevolent industrialists including William Lever at Port Sunlight on Merseyside and George Cadbury at Bournville in Birmingham had already provided vegetable allotments with their workers’ homes. Now garden towns modelled on Howard’s theories were built at Letchworth from 1903 and Welwyn from 1920. Howard’s homes, each with its own garden and vegetable plot, formed a template for housing estates right through the twentieth century, although after the war-time frenzy of vegetable growing, the vegetable plot began to retreat down the gardens. The preserving and packaging industries and the availability of cheap imported vegetables made store-bought produce cheap and attractive.

Then, just as Stuart Dudley was suggesting in the 1960s that it was ‘uneconomical in the accepted meaning of the word to keep the kitchen supplied with vegetables from the garden’, the kitchen garden started to enjoy a slow revival. There was a whole-food movement and a rise in vegetarianism in the 1960s. In the 1970s students grew vegetables among their cannabis plants on dubious pieces of squatted ground, and hippies, in between protests against the Vietnam war, took over unloved allotments to grow fresh vegetables to accompany their frugal meals of brown rice and bacon bits. There were fastidious bio-dynamic gardeners and organic growers who, frustrated in their search for pesticide-free produce, turned to growing their own. There were city farms and social projects espousing the therapeutic benefits of growing vegetables for people with disabilities. Television, which was overtaking gardening as one of the nation’s most popular past times, played its part by creating improbable media celebrities of gardeners like Geoff Hamilton who were more than happy to show a nation how to grow vegetables again. In 1999 the prestigious garden exhibition at Chaumont-sur-Loire was devoted to ‘Nothing But Vegetables’ and, as rock stars like Paul and Linda McCartney and royals like the then Prince of Wales, later the King of England, reinstated their vegetable gardens, home grown vege­tables once again became as fashionable as they were fresh. Championing their cause were celebrity chefs and food activists including Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fernley-Whittingstall who told The Guardian newspaper in 2011: ‘We need to eat more vegetables and less flesh because vegetables are the foods that do us the most good and our planet the least harm.’ Vegetables had become a potential solution to the global crisis of climate change.

TOP FIVE

FAVOURITE VEGETABLE SEEDS

1. Carrot

2. Parsnip

3. Broad Bean

4. Beetroot

5. Cauliflower

Source: Medwyns of Anglesey, specialist seed merchant.

BOUNDARIES, WALLS AND FENCES

Good fences make good neighbours. They also make good kitchen gardens. The need to fence the vegetable plot has exercised gardeners for centuries. Hedges, sunken fences, walls and wide watercourses all played their part.

Water was an effective way to keep predators off the kitchen garden. (It could keep them in too; in medieval times a water-filled ditch was often used to contain the rabbit warren and ensure a supply of fresh meat.) A ready water supply also allowed for regular watering and a place to grow useful willows, rushes and watermint. In pre-Roman Britain, at least, there was no need to fret about rabbit fencing since the coney had yet to be brought to Britain. Long after they had left there were other beasts to worry about. A surplus of wolves (and rioting Welshmen), for example, drove the monks of Llanthony from their monastery in the remote Black Mountains of Wales to the safety of Gloucester in 1135. Once the wolves were gone, marauding deer and cattle might still devour the peasant’s winter supplies of leeks and coleworts. While the peasant was pestered by rapacious animals, abbots and abbesses fretted about light-fingered passers-by. Stonewalls were usefully employed to guard the vegetable plot. The oldest dated wall in Britain, at Skara Brae on Orkney, was built around 3,500 years ago, while the silvered stone boundaries that crisscrossed the limestone uplands of Britain were infants by comparison, many dating back to the monastic wool trade of the 1200s and 1300s. The golden limestone walls of the Cotswolds gardens were later additions still. Most date back to the Enclosure Acts of the 1700s and 1800s. The waller’s craft varied from region to region, the Cotswold’s dry-stone men topping their walls with combers while in the Peak District they had a preference for upright coping stones laid in a crenellated, ‘cock and hens’ style. The Cornishman, meanwhile, favoured an earthen bank reinforced with a herringbone pattern of stone.

Emperor Caesar, pushing through northern Europe during the Gallic wars was impressed by a different type of boundary, the hedge. ‘These hedges present a barrier like a wall,’ he declared. The living hedge, protected by a ditch to keep browsing cattle at bay, was made by planting saplings of thorn, oak, crab, hawthorn and holly against a temporary stake and pole fence. Within a decade the saplings were tall enough to be laid, when the sap was down, during the winter. The hedger would cut into the lower part of the sapling and bending it over, weave it around fresh stakes cut from surplus hedge timber. The top of the hedge was finished with a whippy rail of willow or hazel and a small willow bed was often planted close by to provide spare parts. As Thomas Tusser pointed out in his Five Hundred Pointes of Good Husbandrie: ‘… euerie (every) hedge/hath plenty of fewell and fruit.’