In service with a smile

Charting the restoration of a walled garden under the steady hand of Harry Dodson, The Victorian Kitchen Garden is a delightful slice of gardening history, says Ursula Buchan

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I WONDER if you remember the haunting clarinet playing by Emma Johnson that heralded the beginning of the 13 episodes of The Victorian Kitchen Garden in 1987? It is in my head now as I recall this jewel of BBC television, since this summer marks 20 years since the death of its undoubted star, Harry Dodson.

This series seemed, and still seems to me, to exemplify the best that the small screen could offer in the way of garden history, the like of which I doubt we shall see again. When Jennifer Davies of the BBC met Dodson, while looking for a place to film a series about the heyday of the country house garden, she found the ideal man to demonstrate what it had been like to be in 'private service'. He'd been head gardener at a country estate called Chilton Foliat, near Hungerford, since 1947 and had continued there after economic stringencies forced the owners in 1981 to lease the walled garden to him for a commercial market garden operation. Although born in 1919, he had worked with men who had been trained in Victorian times in the 'old ways' of precise and highly skilled horticulture, capable of providing fruit, vegetables and flowers the whole year round for country house owners, their guests and staff.