Growth factors

The kitchen garden at Gravetye Manor, near East Grinstead, West Sussex Mary Keen talks to head gardener Tom Coward about bringing life and produce back to William Robinson’s magnificent elliptical walled garden

- William Robinson

IN 1898, the famous gardener and contributor to COUNTRY LIFE William Robinson built an elliptical walled kitchen garden for his home at Gravetye Manor in West Sussex. The perfect ellipse has rounded corners to trap the sun and, protected by massive walls of local Weald stone quarried from the estate, the acre and a half of ground would have supplied everything that its vegetarian bachelor owner could have desired. But, after two World Wars and with labour costs rising, the place echoed many such productive gardens and fell into disrepair. Robinson died in 1935 and, in the late 1950s, Gravetye was turned into a country-house hotel, but the renaissance of the walled enclosure as a rare survival of a fully working estate kitchen garden only came in 2010. This was the date that saw the new ownership of Jeremy Hosking and the appointment of Tom Coward as head gardener.

It’s bigger than a hobby garden and smaller than a commercial one

Mr Coward is one of England’s best and most experienced gardeners. He studied commercial horticulture at Pershore College in Worcestershire, trained at Kew and then worked at a tree nursery. He spent time at a hotel in New Zealand, before a spell at Great Dixter, East Sussex, and says he has always grown vegetables at home ‘because I am greedy’, so he was the ideal choice to plan the restoration of the gardens at Gravetye Manor hotel. ‘It’s on an interesting scale,’ he says. ‘Bigger than a hobby garden and smaller than a commercial one.’