Cloche encounters

Good news for gardeners: the traditional cast-iron cloche is being made again by an enterprising young British couple near Bath, finds Tiffany Daneff

- Tiffany Daneff

FOR gardeners who, for years, have been searching—most probably in vain—to buy a traditional Victorian-style cast-iron cloche, there is some excellent news. The cloches are once again being made, at a workshop near Bath, and they are even better than the originals.

The Victorian cloche is the acme of cloches —sturdy, beautiful, and extremely practical at protecting plants from those troublesome early frosts. There is nothing to beat them, but they have been out of production for decades, apart from a brief moment in the 1990s.

Most people first encounter them in an old walled garden where a few rusted examples survive and so it was with the founders of Claverton Cloches, Beth Gregg, 27, and her partner Janus Intelmann, 29. At the beginning of 2020, they were both working from home thanks to lockdown, and, no longer commuting to their jobs in finance, they decided to delve a little further into their search for a traditional cloche for their garden in Bath.

Mr. Intelmann had been fascinated by Victorian cloches ever since he was taken as a very small child to Audley End in Essex by his mother. ‘The miniature glasshouses in the kitchen garden looked, to him, like toy houses,’ reveals Miss Gregg.