Bees and Bras at Attingham Park’s Kitchen Garden

Attingham Park in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England, has a walled kitchen garden, which is something of an inspiration for kitchen gardeners everywhere. Restoration began in 2001, following 40 years of neglect during which time it was used as a football ground and Christmas tree plantation. A lot of hard work was needed to restore the facility to the glorious kitchen garden we see today complete with bee hives, sculptures, and enough fruit and vegetables to feed an army. Work parties began by re-pointing the walls and reinstating the dipping pond. In 2008, a kitchen gardener, Jenny Chandler, was appointed, and she, with lots of enthusiastic volunteers, planted the first quarter of the garden.

The following year the second quarter was planted, and today the garden supplies the tea rooms, café and shop. The entire garden, greenhouses, and orchard are managed using organic principles.

Gardener Kate Nicoll talked me through the daily activities of the gardening team: “We spend most mornings picking, sorting, and weighing fresh salads and vegetables for the tea room and shop,” she says. “Areas of bare ground are covered with overwintering green manures such as crimson clover and alfalfa. This helps to suppress annual weeds and the crops are worked back into the soil in the spring. The gardens are managed on a six year rotation cycle which reduces the prevalence of pests and disease”.

The bees

Attingham Park has a thriving bee population, living in one of only two Grade II listed bee houses in Britain. Originally the Attingham Park bee house, dated to around 1805, was located in the orchard so the bees could pollinate the fruit trees, but it was moved near to the kitchen garden in the 1980s.

It’s of wooden construction, with a slate roof, and there is space for 12 straw hives, called skeps. Old style bee keeping in skeps, relied on killing the bees at the end of the year to get the honey. Today, the Trust uses modern National Hives that allow the bee keepers to remove honey without harming the bees.

Bee keeper Mary, told us about her years of experience, “Bee keeping was nerve-racking at first, but then I found I enjoyed it. We used to send samples of honey to DEFRA to find out from which plant the pollen originates. On one occasion, years ago, there were delays and the scientists couldn’t work out what they’d been feeding on. Eventually, when the answer came back, they said it was Coca Cola!” These were not the Attingham Park bees, as she wasn’t volunteering for the Trust at that time, but it made an amusing story!

We looked at the bee-friendly plants which help to keep the bee population happy and in the corner of the garden was a glass panel enabling us to see inside a bee hive — fascinating.

Mary explained, “The queen is at the centre of the colony which contains up to 60,000 bees. She is the only fertile female and she lays all the eggs. The workers only live for about a month and when they die, the other bees carry their bodies outside through a little exit on the other side of the wall. Male bees, called drones, mate with new queens in the summer, who start new colonies.”

The Bothy

Next to the demonstration bee area, is the gardener’s house, called the Bothy. It is basic accommodation where unmarried gardeners used to live and work up until the 1920s. A display of old gardening tools, and old cooking and gardening books brings it to life. A copy of the original record book of the planting scheme around 100 years ago is displayed. Young garden boys would have slept upstairs in the loft, cooked and washed downstairs, and worked long hours, reporting to the head gardener.

The greenhouses

The greenhouses in the frame yard are well worth a visit. They are open every day unless it is very windy. Inside, the fruit is lush and spectacular — it’s hard not to be tempted to eat it! The wonderful scent of basil hits you as you enter the melon house, and the melons are held up in little pouches that look like ladies’ bras!

The frame yard is full of ripe fruit, cut flower beds and vegetable seed beds. In the spring, the gardeners sow vegetable plants and annual flowers into trays and pots in the greenhouses. Later in the year, they grow melons, peppers and aubergines in the greenhouses because they grow better in a warm environment. In the autumn, salad crops are grown there to supply the tearoom during the winter.

The orchard contains 160 apple trees and is a lovely picnic spot with chickens that love to wallow in the dry mud. The Mansion tea room offers home made soups and salads made from the walled garden produce to complete the kitchen garden experience.

Find out more: www.nationaltrust.org.uk/attingham-park