Peasgood Part 2
Interviewing Joe Whitehead - Head Gardener at Burghley House
I am standing in a very empty, enormous walled garden on the Burghley House estate. Once it would have been full of fruit trees - apples, pears, peaches, along with vegetables and flowers; all tended by 120 gardeners employed on the Burghley estate. Today there are a few original pear trees around the edges. There are two big fig trees which were once encased in a greenhouse, which has long since gone, only the whitewashed wall behind the fig trees, a clue to what once stood there. The Head Gardener in charge of it between 1867 and 1895, Mr R. Gilbert, claimed that he could put a pineapple on the table, on any day of the year!
So how does this walled garden connect with the original plant story of the Peasgood’s nonsuch apple tree? Whilst researching that episode (Ep 5) in the RHS Archive, I had spotted that a Mr R. Gilbert of Burghley Gardens had exhibited the Peasgood apples in the 1883 National Apple Conference. Burghley House in Stamford is only a few miles from where a teenage girl, who went onto marry Mr Peasgood, had planted the apple pips, which grew and bore the enormous apples. Her family worked at Burghley House and knew the Head Gardener Mr Richard Gilbert, so he would have known of the Peasgood’s nonsuch apples and grown them in the walled garden.
I’ve come to talk to the present Head Gardener - Joe Whitehead. He shows me Mr R. Gilberts office, overlooking the walled garden, either side of his office are two long fruit lofts with shelving to store the ripening fruit, shutters to control the light levels and temperature. Downstairs, Joe battles with an old door, slightly stuck on it’s hinges, and then leads us into an underground room where they grew mushrooms. And then there is the vast, 6.5 acre walled kitchen garden sub-divided into 6 smaller walled spaces. It has been untouched since the 1960s when it fell out of use but there are plans afoot to bring it back to life. Within those smaller spaces, there will be a Victorian kitchen garden celebrating Mr R. Gilbert but also a cut flower garden, remembering that once flowers were sent daily from here to Covent Garden market and a tropical garden celebrating that Pineapple claim. It will be a place to celebrate horticulture both from the past and looking to the future - with sustainable gardening.
So first, this plant story takes us back 150 years with Mr and Mrs Peasgood’s enormous apple being awarded a First Class Certificate by the Royal Horticultural Society and declared ‘nonsuch’, none so good as the Peasgood’s apple. But then the plant story brings us to the present and a walled garden that feels like it is about to wake after a long sleep. Joe Whitehead may never have 120 paid gardeners but I am sure as he embarks upon this exciting project he will have many volunteers.
He assures me that there will be Peasgood’s nonsuch apples, in fact there is a small one already planted in the garden but not yet bearing fruit. So as I write this I am still as yet to see or taste this apple however I am getting closer to it. At the garden I met Denis Smith who also has a passion for this story and knowledge to match not just about this one variety of apple but others, many of them local to the area. He finds a ‘Reverend Wilks’ in the garden which in many ways resembles the Peasgood - apparently because one of its parents is the Peasgood. I take it home where everyone remarks on how big it is …well it is but wait till we see its parent - that apparently is a really big apple, the size of a small training football!
The Walled garden podcast episode will be released next Friday so if you want to catch up on Part 1 of the story you can listen here!