Picton Castle and Gardens

The Walled Garden Project

If you have visited Picton Castle recently or were to do so in the next few months, you would notice some unusual activity going on in and around the Walled Garden. This is all part of a huge renovation project to restore the Walled Garden and allow visitors to see and experience how, historically, the garden would have worked.

Historically the Walled Garden was used to grow more exotic foods that do not excel in our climate. Now we simply airfreight in foods such as grapes, oranges and melons, but this was not possible in the past. Instead, these would have been grown in the Walled Garden and the Courtyard adjacent to it. When these were built in 1800 they had glasshouses, a boiler and central heating through the walls to provide the heat needed to grow exotic fruits and prize winning flowers.

The project will restore all of these features. We will be rebuilding the Heritage Glasshouse in the Walled Garden Courtyard, and renovating the rare grape ripening room. Inside some of the original gardeners’ cottages there will be an exhibition and teaching space and we are even building a Bat Hotel!

Restoring the Grade II listed Walled Garden is a £1.2million project, partly funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund. This will enable us to open up a huge area of the garden to the public for the first time and will allow visitors a deeper understanding of those who lived and worked at Picton Castle. Luckily the Walled Garden will remain open during this project (although sections maybe temporarily closed from time to time). We can’t wait until the project is finished and the Walled Garden and Courtyard is restored to it’s former glory.

 

 

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