Spotted Pigs and Green Tomatoes Read Free Page B

long. At the end of November 2004, David arrived one Saturday
     morning with a new idea. Across the park, to the north of Dillington House, was a Victorian walled garden almost two acres
     in size and unused since the early 1960s.
    In the pale, late autumn sunshine we walked over to inspect the site. The walls were made of mellow old red brick, marks still
     visible where once ornate glasshouses had stood. It was built on a slight slope, angling downwards to the north, which allowed
     the heat of the day to pool into its corners. Even in the thin November sun, the bricks on the north wall were warm to the
     touch and as we leant back we could feel the heat stored within. To the west the wall had collapsed - a previous estate manager
     in a hurry had driven straight through it to provide easy access to the lower pastures - but apart from that they stood solid
     and intact.
    Inside the old tumbledown potting shed, a wooden door was covered with spidery inscriptions, records of the weather and the
     movements of migrating birds, dating back to the 1850's: 'April 12, 1851, first swallows arrive.' They had been written by
     James Kelway, then the eighteen-year-old head gardener at Dillington House, later to become one of the great Victorian gardeners
     and founder of Kelway's Nurseries at Langport, breeder of peonies and irises and inventor of the cineraria plant. When Kelway
     came to Dillington the house was owned by an ancestor of Ewen's, Vaughan Hanning Vaughan Lee, a keen gardener who built two
     grape houses and grew peaches, melons and even bananas in the walled garden. He was particularly partial to his grapes, and
     one day while shopping in Jackson's of Piccadilly his eye was drawn to a display of large, especially succulent ones. Recently,
     he had been annoyed that his own grapes weren't as perfect, so he decided to buy them to show Kelway just what really good
     English-grown grapes could look like. On enquiring where they came from, he learned that these were the 'famous Dillington
     grapes', possibly the best in the whole of England. Later that night, Kelway was unceremoniously sacked for stealing.

    Ewen was happy to extend a long lease on the walled garden and the surrounding five acres, which comprised a very old orchard,
     and two wooded areas to the north and south. Our rent was set at a nominal £1 for year one, to compensate for the amount of
     work needed, rising to £3,000 by the third year. Old fridges, dead sheep, countless plastic sacks, bits of metal and other
     assorted rubbish had been dumped in the area immediately outside the garden over the last few decades. Occasionally local
     people, like David's brother Mark and his girlfriend Louise, had arranged to keep their sheep in the garden, but apart from
     that the whole area had remained untouched and derelict since the early 1960s.
    The clearing began in earnest in January 2005: Mark and David borrowed a digger from the estate, and the rubbish was soon
     safely sunk twelve feet down. We rotavated the rest of the ground. Inside the nursery, years of couch grass broke up under
     the blades into tiny little white roots, each one a new weed. There was no option but to delay planting while we zapped the
     weed with Round-up, the most powerful weedkiller on the market. What to do with the woods? We all wanted to keep pigs, so
     the wood to the north was fenced off, a timbered house erected and muddy wallows dug out along the path of the underground
     spring. The first three Gloucester Old Spots, Bluebell, Bramble and Guinness, arrived in early April. Chickens were the next,
     seemingly logical, step, so a half-acre site outside the walls, once an old orchard but now just an unused area with a walnut
     and chestnut tree, was fenced off and secured from foxes by an electric wire circling the enclosure a foot above the ground.
     More huts and coops needed building. We didn't stop at chickens: twenty noisy geese, seven ducks and an assortment of 'rare
     breeds'