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Somewhere along a stretch of brick wall winding through the fields of Yorkshire, there is a single wooden door that – to the unobservant passer-by – can easily be missed. Looking around the landscape that surrounds it, with fresh grass and cloud-like bushes spotting the plains, it seems that nature can’t get much better than this. Yet a small speckle of red Armeria maritima peeking from behind the wall signals a colourful world beyond – a world that has been cultivated by the sedulous gardener Peter Smith.
‘My dad used to be interested in gardening,’ says Peter. ‘And when I was little, I used to win most of the local shows around with my vegetables and flowers. Then when I left school, I was offered a few jobs. The dowager duchess [Deborah Mitford] – heard about me and asked if I’d start on Bolton Abbey estate and bring the gardens back, because they’d had no gardener to tend to them since the 30s. So, I started working there in 1976.’
In 1981, Lord Hartington – the duchess’s son – moved to Beamsley Hall (a mile from Bolton Abbey) and Peter was made head gardener of the pastures there. When Lord Hartington became Duke of Devonshire in 2004, they moved back to the family seat at Chatsworth; Peter was asked to stay on as head gardener at the Hall. ‘We made a beautiful and fantastic garden, people came from all over to look at it!’ Peter relays proudly, having spent almost 20 years tending it.
It took considerable labour to create this beautiful green space, however. ‘In the 90s, somebody had gone through [it] with a bulldozer, so they had taken all of the history away – it was all gone,’ Peter explains, recalling the derelict state in which the kitchen garden once existed. ‘Then the forestry department took over and filled it with trees, so when I arrived I started off with only half of it – the estate agents at the time said I could have [it] for the duke – so I made that half look nice. The forestry department’s side was full of weeds, though, so I ended up taking the whole thing over. I started to lay down hedges and bring it back to life with pathways and greenhouses.’
‘It was really just an open box when I got there,’ Peter emphasises. ‘The wind used to just holler in, so I put a shelter belt at the bottom of the garden with large trees to mollify the gust and then I intersected it into compartments with beech and hornbeam hedges to make microclimates. Around the edges, I’ve grown vegetables and flowers.’
Peter envisioned the area not only as a ‘pleasure garden where the duke and duchess could come, with their friends and family’, but also as a space that would provide sustainable produce to the chefs at the Hall. ‘During the early summer, I grow asparagus and then I plant kale, swiss chard, grapes, melons, pears, salad crops, different varieties of carrots and all types of vegetables, really,’ he explains.
In addition to vegetables, peonies, phlox, sweet peas and dahlias can be found here at this time of year, alongside annuals like larkspur. During winter, Peter harvests Helichrysum and statice to compose the dried-flower arrangements that decorate the Hall’s interiors.
This wealth of vegetation is all solely gardened and governed by him, and he says that the hardest part of his job is the lack of a helping hand. Yet, unwaveringly motivated by the magic of nature, he readily wakes up at 7am. daily and heads straight to the kitchen garden, where the pruning and sowing begins. ‘Depending on what time of year it is, I also do the greenhouses,’ he reveals, ‘and after lunch I come back down to the Hall and start looking after the hall gardens. So I have to split my days.’
Unlike the kitchen garden, the Hall garden is traditional, with clean-cut lawns and various ornamental shrubs and trees dotted around the space. This area is jointly conceptualised by Peter and the duke; its edges are fringed with wild flowers alongside lush flora and foliage. It also offers a terrace area where guests can lounge while enjoying afternoon tea; the large lawn has hosted croquet games, pitch and putt, and al fresco dining.
Although speaking with Peter in summer put the garden’s bloom at the forefront of our conversation, I was intrigued to know how the winter months altered his horticultural practices. ‘It’s getting strange,’ he replies, ‘because when I first started in gardens we had winters; now we don’t have winters. It’s mild all the way through!’ He goes on to explain that this phenomenon has also had an adverse effect on his gardening. ‘This year especially was so dry that nothing germinated,’ he laments. ‘There was no water for the kitchen garden. When when I first started there, there was no water at all, so – because there’s a stream running outside the garden – I ran a pipe under the wall and made a dipping pond, which then runs, by pipe, to each greenhouse and then goes back down into the stream at the bottom of the garden. I’ve got plenty of water at the moment, but this year has been drier than the rest.’
Peter’s winters are mainly spent sorting out the greenhouses and pruning the apple and other fruit trees on the walls, which he says, ‘takes quite a long while’. Along with the vegetable garden – ‘really nice just to walk into and see it as it is’ – these greenhouses are one of his favourite parts of the kitchen garden. But of course, all of it is equally beautiful in its own right, as Peter admits, smiling. The garden beams back, aglow with the love that revived it.
The kitchen garden is not open to the public and can only be accessed by guests of The Hall. Prices start from £25,900 for a minimum of three nights for up to 18 guests and include room, board and staff. Details: www.thehallandlismorecastle.com
