The National Trust looks after over 25 working and ornamental kitchen gardens across the country. Here you can see regional and traditional varieties of fruit and vegetables grown as they would have been in the gardens’ heyday when they would have supplied the house with fresh produce throughout the year.
Growing your own food, whether in your back garden or an allotment, is once again all the rage and we have all become more aware of the distance much of our food has travelled before it reaches us. An increasing number of National Trust restaurants are now supplied with the tastiest seasonal ingredients direct from their own kitchen gardens. The food on the plate has travelled metres rather than miles, guaranteeing its freshness and preserving its home grown taste.
Why not visit one of these glorious kitchen gardens and see the mouth-watering array of crops grown, find inspiration for your own garden and taste the produce for yourself over lunch in the restaurant?
Barrington Court in Somerset has a one acre kitchen garden that was established in the 1920s and has been in continuous use ever since. The garden produces a diverse crop, including rhubarb, mini sweet corn and leeks.
In Devon, Knightshayes Court has a unique Victorian walled kitchen garden that produces fruit, vegetables and cut flowers, while Wimpole Hall’s walled garden in Cambridgeshire produces a wide range of vegetables including an amazing 60 varieties of tomato, and hosts seasonal events such as the Tomato Festival in August and Squash Week in September.
Hughenden Manor, Buckinghamshire, is the former home of Queen Victoria’s favourite Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, and has recently opened its Victorian kitchen garden to the public for the first time.
Visitors to Clumber Park in Nottinghamshire will be able to see the progress of Clumber’s developing garden as it is extended to occupy all of the four and a half acres of the original Kitchen Garden, where they currently grow more than 70 varieties of fruit and vegetables. Clumber’s walled garden has one of the longest glasshouses owned by the National Trust.
Several National Trust kitchen gardens are working to highlight seasonal produce, as part of its ‘From Plot to Plate’ project, which takes visitors on a journey of discovery, showing the importance of local and seasonal food and providing practical advice with quick and easy steps to produce tasty and healthy dishes. The programme of events enables children and adults to find out more about the history and distinctiveness of English food and the choices that we make when deciding what we eat. A great opportunity for young and old to learn more about our food, its production and preparation, while having plenty of hands-on fun along the way.
Out to lunch: fresh fruit and vegetables straight to your plate
Time for tea: great places to stop
Take away: farm shops and markets