PRODUCTIVE GARDEN COLLECTION

Herb Garden

Herb gardens are basically a 20th century invention. Gertrude Jeykll lead the fashion for herb gardens with a bold formal framework of paving and evergreens to set off the simple, sometimes untidy and vigorous plants, and to make the garden more appealing during the bare winter months. The example shown at Hamilton Gardens demonstrates how effective this simple formula with four rectangular plots can be.
However unless you are totally besotted with using herbs a large formal garden is going to be mainly decorative. At times herb gardens have been quite elaborate such as the high maintenance 16th / 17th century knot gardens that often used box to create decorative framework. There is certainly no ideal way to display herbs and they often mix well with ornamental planting to take advantage of a range of growing conditions.

Over the past 300 years there have been cycles of popularity for herbs and for the different forms of herb garden. In medieval times all plants, cultivated and uncultivated, were believed to have medicinal values and some like the stinging nettle had dozens of uses. Gardeners then used the word 'herb' to describe all useful plants, weather they were used for food, flavouring, medicines, disinfectants, pesticides, perfumes, poisons, dyes, narcotics or hallucinogens. It was not until the 18th century that plants used mainly for food began to be called 'vegetables' and the word 'herb' described other practical plants. By the 17th century the kitchen garden had become quite orderly and where possible herbs and plants that were not renewed every year were grown in separate beds and sometimes separate areas.

The use of herbs for culinary purposes is well known although these days it is to enhance flavour rather than to disguise the taste of bad meat. In the late 19th century it was common for many households to concoct tonics, lotions, purges, poultices and salves using plants from their garden. While using wode to make your face blue has gone out of fashion and geranium tea is certainly an acquired taste, many herbs are still used for medicinal, cosmetic and perfume purposes, its just that for convenience we purchase them processed and packaged from the shop like fast foods rather than direct from the garden.

However in some parts of Asia there are still genuinely productive herb gardens. When I visited China a few years ago every hospital I walked past had their own medicinal herb garden, usually set out in pots, to supply their pharmacy, hospice, and infirmary. Chinese doctors have apparently used many of these herbs for at least 5,000 years, when the first surviving Chinese herbals were written.

Medicinal use of herbs in Europe largely originated from the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans. One extremely influential book called 'The Doctrine of Signatures' promoted a theory that plants which looked like the symptoms of an illness would cure it. Cosmetic use of herbs included colouring the hair or skin, skin cleansers, facemasks, shampoos, bath oils, soaps, talcum powders, oils and creams.

The four beds in the Hamilton Gardens example are defined by their purpose, - culinary, medicinal, cosmetic and perfume herbs. Two other sections of the Herb Garden at Hamilton Gardens contain herbs used for dyes and for herbal teas.

Kitchen Garden

There can be few more satisfying and attractive minimalist gardens than a well-kept kitchen garden although not when it is your own and you start noticing everything that requires attention. That doyen of floral plants women, Gertrude Jekyll, wrote "when I am free to take a quiet stroll for pure pleasure of the garden, I take it among the vegetables". It probably helped that she had several staff to do all the weeding and spraying.
The ideal, old-fashioned kitchen garden of our imagination is a walled garden. In many European examples walls as high as 4 metres and the unexpected quietness inside creates an atmosphere of security, retreat and mystery.

As early as 2,300 B.C. the ancient Egyptians had walled kitchen gardens where they grew leeks, lettuces, gourds, cos, cucumbers, garlic, onions and radishes in chequerboard plots divided by irrigation channels. The Romans villas also had very sophisticated kitchen gardens but things went down hill throughout much of Europe during medieval times. For example the Romans in Britain grew a wide variety of herbs and vegetables including 12 kinds of cabbage and 11 types of lettuce. Yet when Henry VIII's first wife, Catherine, fancied a salad or lettuce she had to dispatch a messenger to Holland or Flanders to procure them. They even had to import the turnips and parsnips though why on earth anyone would want to is puzzling. Henry's wife must have continued to complain about her limp lettuces because apart from starting a habit of changing wives Henry was said to be personally responsible for reintroducing many of the Roman vegetables to Britain including the lettuce and the turnip and parsnip. By Tudor times kitchen gardens no longer needed to be walled for defense but a rampart around the inside of the walls was fancied for views over the garden and the surrounding countryside. Elizabethan kitchen gardens reintroduced flowers around the outer edges but by the early 17th century kitchen gardens had generally returned to a more specialised form.

The example at Hamilton Gardens has many of the features of the classic European 18th / 19th century gardens if not the design detail. These were usually square or rectangular divided, depending on its size, into two, four or six compartments. Beds were sometimes separated by trenches for drainage and irrigation particularly in dry southern European climates and in English gardens until at least the 14th century when the climate became wetter. The use of raised beds has been common since at least Roman times and took many forms often with impermanent retaining.

By the late 16th Century there was a strong demand for foreign, tender desert fruits like apricots, peaches and almonds and early flowering plums, cherries, gooseberries, currents, medlars and quinces which in northern Europe usually had to be grown against a 'fruit wall'. They were often trained and espaliered to create decorative and sometimes highly elaborate effects. By the beginning of the 18th century new gardens usually had a longer axis running east west to present the longest wall to the sun for growing fruit. The walls held the daytime heat, extended the growing season and were invaluable for the production of first class fruit. Research has shown that the amount of heat reflected close to a sunny brick wall can equal 7 degrees latitude and certainly crops in the Kitchen Garden at Hamilton Gardens often ripen before others in the region.

The Kitchen garden layout consisted of borders beneath the walls separated by rolled paths from the main beds or 'quarters'. These outer borders contained the fruit trees, small fruit and early or late salad crops; the quarters were planted in rotation with various brassicas, legumes, onions and root crops. The melon ground often occupied a small enclosure within the main garden, and separate beds were marked off for perennial vegetables such as asparagus and globe artichokes. A pond in the centre of the garden provided 'softened' water for dry spells. While these gardens were expensive to make and maintain they apparently produced a wide range of fruit and vegetables of a quality and freshness that is seldom approached by today's supermarket-friendly varieties.

Along with the traditional kitchen garden there was usually some form of compost yard or farmyard because without fertilizing material it would cease to be productive. Often there was also an old dunghill and a new dunghill and night soil was sometimes collected specifically for the kitchen garden. There was often a 'dipping pond' for watering the crops usually located in a prominent central position.

Another feature in the kitchen garden at Hamilton Gardens is a gardener's shed displaying, through a window, some of the tools used in the 19th century kitchen garden. For example vegetable hampers, trugs, pots, cloches, bell jars, wasp traps, and old implements like dibbers, sieves, scythes, mattocks, tines, scrapers, transplanters, hedging shears, sulphurators, smoke diffusers, bellows and spray gun.

On a smaller scale a walled kitchen garden still offers plenty of scope in a modern garden. Fruit trees, espallieres and vines set against high enclosing walls punctuated by mysterious doors. In the centre simple rectangular beds of herbs and vegetables surrounding a simple water feature. The use of crop rotation, organic compost and manures. These are the key elements of a 4,000 year-old form of garden.

Sustainable Backyard Garden

The Sustainable Backyard Garden, established in 2001 by the Hamilton Permaculture Trust, has the primary objective to act as a demonstration of practical Permaculture as it may be applied to the average suburban backyard.
In 1999 a group of volunteers set up an organic garden in the Hamilton Gardens, to promote organic gardening, permaculture and sustainable living. This 'Community Garden' grew in popularity and this led to the establishment in 2000/2001 of the permanent demonstration garden now known as the 'Sustainable Backyard Garden' in an area previously known as the 'Backyard Garden'.

The original backyard garden was dismantled and the new garden built by volunteers, with help from Hamilton Skill Centre and students from the Wintec Horticultural department. Various projects were undertaken; a 'chicken tractor', a new pergola to accommodate beehives, adobe seating and a water feature using solar energy.

Permaculture combines a set of ethics with a set of principles, applied to allow us to create our own sustainable environments in a 'permanent culture' - not a throwaway one.

This garden is a working garden, maintained by the Hamilton Permaculture Trust volunteers. It has a strong educational focus, for both visitors and volunteers with productive vegetable beds, chickens which are moved to different beds, a worm farm, composting, liquid manure barrels, and a range of fruit trees, berries and vines.