At Kiplin Hall you’ll encounter of stories about adventure enjoyed by members of the four families who lived there – the Calverts, Crowes, Carpenters, and Talbots. We’d like to share a glimpse through the keyhole, exploring a different room each week. This week, we wander out into the Walled Garden

In the past, large houses such as Kiplin would have relied on productive gardens to provide the kitchens with fresh fruit and vegetables to feed residents and guests.

The Walled Garden at Kiplin provides a warm and sheltered environment, making it possible to grow seasonal fruits, berries, salad leaves and root vegetables, as well as flowers and herbs in the North Yorkshire climate.

Today, one of the first things visitors see when they enter the walled garden is a row of apple trees, trained on wires.

The oldest of these, with its gnarled bark was probably part of Eden Nesfields’ designs for Kiplin. Nestfield worked at Kiplin between 1874 and 1892. He introduced a lot of the sight lines we enjoy today, and there is a perfect one from the white bench against the wall in the walled garden, along the line of apple trees to the end of the south lawn.

The Northern Echo:

But kitchen gardens are not just useful, they are also decorative and thoughtfully designed for people to admire. In the Kiplin Library, there is a book called “An Encyclopaedia of Gardening; comprising the theory and practice of Horticulture, Floriculture, Arboriculture and Landscape-Gardening, by J C Loudon. 1822.” which describes the different kinds of training gardeners can apply to fruit trees. By spreading the branches in this way growers can make use of the warm walls ripening fruit and easy to reach produce when it’s time to harvest.

The Northern Echo:

Chris Baker, the current head gardener, describes the apple trees at Kiplin today: “The apple trees at Kiplin were trained up to the 1920s. In the 1950s and 1960s the kitchen garden was used as a market garden and the trees were allowed to grow un-trained.

“After Bridget Talbot’s death (the last owner of Kiplin), the wardens who looked after the hall let sheep graze in what used to be the walled garden, to keep the grass short with minimum effort. However, sheep eat the tree bark and thus killed most of the trained apple trees, and now only one survives. It is hollow, so is carefully supported. We don’t know what variety it is. It hasn’t had fruit on it yet, but when it does, we can then send it off to RHS Wisley, who have records of all varieties.”

The Northern Echo:

Today, Chris manages a large team of volunteers to maintain the Walled Garden and the wider grounds. During lockdown volunteering had to cease. But in line with government advice, small teams have been able to return, doing battle with the weeds.

The Northern Echo:

One-way routes are now in operation around the gardens and grounds to allow for social distancing while visitors enjoy the sights, sounds, and smells all around them.

At this time of year rows of sweet peas fragrance the air and soft fruits such as raspberries and alpine strawberries are beginning to ripen. Normally the volunteers pick the berries for the Kiplin kitchens where it is made into jam and used in baking or sold to visitors.

In the coming weeks we will explore more of the grounds of Kiplin, including the wildflowers growing along the lakeside paths and the fungi of the woodland.