The Walled Garden in the 1950’s |
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| The E.H.C. Jones Letterhead |
During the 1950’s the walled garden was used as a market garden by E.H.C. Jones (Carly Jones), who lived in the gardener’s house. Les Complin, who worked in the garden as a boy, remembers what is was like. It was his first job on leaving school at fourteen. He saw a sign advertising for a gardener, went in and got the job. His first week’s wage in 1956 was £5 7s 6d.
The garden was mainly used for the commercial growing of flowers and the main growing area, three of the four quarters in rotation, was given over to growing scabious. One of Les’s jobs was to cut and pack the flowers to be taken to the L.N.E.R station in Ramsey, to be sold in Leeds market.
The garden was very different from today and the glass houses were intact. One glass house was given over to arum lilies, another smaller one to freesias, which Mrs Jones liked. The glass house at the western end was used for growing tomatoes. These were misted daily and the glasshouse was flooded once a week.
The walls were covered with tree fruit – pears etc. and chrysanthemums were also grown.
The old bothies and sheds on the north side of the north wall were in use with a flower packing shed, tool shed etc. The old boiler house was present but not usable.
Vegetables were grown outside the walls in beds to the north of the garden – currently the gardens of houses in Lawrence Road. There was an asparagus bed and, immediately to the north of the well, a patch of Christmas Roses for the winter flower market.
In the field to the east of the garden, currently the school playing field, there was an orchard with a variety of tree fruit and a row of blackberries. A twenty foot hawthorn hedge marked the northern boundary.
Box hedges surrounded three sides of each of the four quadrants and all the edge beds. Les remembers keeping the box hedges neat and trim as a bit of a chore. He also had to make sure the blue edging bricks were all the same height and ‘just so’. The apple tunnel was still standing but was made of wood. He remembers that the apple trees along the central axis were not very productive, even then.