Flatlanders

The house at Audley End is the cut down relic of a much large Jacobean palace, and is surrounded by acres of lavish parkland mostly used these days for picnicing, sunbathing and concerts. Arriving is almost the best part – you stop at the gatehouse and then sweep along the enormous curved drive across the front of the house and to the car park past an enormous mass of cloud-pruned yew.

The interior of the main house left me a little sad – it contained so many beautiful things in mad profusion that it was an assault on the senses, with no particular taste or talent to the arrangement. Seen in isolation there were many things you might want to go and see – the ceilings are almost all decorated, many of them extremely beautifully, and the Jacobean wooden screen in the Great Hall is a wonderful thing. But all together it just seemed too much, and it was a relief to escape to the servants quarters, which are set up as they would be in Victorian times and were refreshingly clean and bright.

Staffed by a couple of in-costume and in-character women, there was much food preparation happening and a general air of cheerfulness and bustle.

It evokes the same feeling of patrician order that Martha Stewart’s blog does – many hands working together to do things properly, the old fashioned way.

The laundry was an impressive, two roomed edifice with a prototype ironing machine and life sized projected laundresses when real ones aren’t available.

Vegetables from the vegetable garden are used in the house and available in the shop.

The walled vegetable garden was restored from an overgrown wasteland by Garden Organic, and is now the highlight of the visit (If you like gardens more than, say, dusty cases too full of dead-eyed stuffed songbirds obviously). It’s a fair walk from the house through Capability-Brown-landscaped parkland, over a mill-race and past old stone fishponds stocked with enormous fish

There must be some kind of invisible heron-repelling barrier in place here.

The walled garden itself is enormous – the area of greenhouses alone is larger than my house.

Espalier and fan trained fruit trees are everywhere – lining the brick walls and half of the main set of pathways. There are over a hundred varieties of apples, all appropriate to the Victorian period, and not just apples but every variety of tree fruit including gages,  a local specialty.

All the plants are beautifully labelled in a calligraphic hand, which makes it nice and easy to pick out what you would like to grow in your own fantasy organic orchard.

The greenhouses are the platonic ideal of a beautiful English greenhouse – white painted wood and full of ordered rows of plants.

Brushing past these two enomous bushes of English Lavender disturbs the scent just enough to waft it inside with you.

In many ways the Victorians were superlative vegetable growers. Without the chemical and biological arsenal our own commercial growing industry relies on but with mass communication and knowledge sharing between professional head gardeners, a lot of interesting growing techniques and hundreds of plant varieties were used that have since been forgotten about. One of the interesting things about our new century is the effort that is going on by gardening researchers to reclam some of that knowledge and regow heritage varieties. Audley End is taking part in that effort.

Read more about the Garden Organic efforts at restoring the garden appropriately here.

And I’ll end with some of the lovely flowers they managed to fit in between the vegetables to attract beneficial insects. (I say fit in, although it’s not such a problem when you have such a large garden…

Audley End

Essex

CB11 4JF

01799 522399 (info line)

Disabled access: 01799 522842

Tags:   audley end · decoration · espalier fruit trees · gardening · greenhouses · historical gardens · historical re-enactment · nineteenth century life · organic garden · organic growing · servants quarters · stately home · victorian4 Comments