The 2 acre kitchen garden was originally built to provide fresh produce for Benhall Lodge which was constructed early in the nineteenth century. It stands about 300 yards to the south east of the nursery on the other side of a wood. Apart from the wall and other buildings which remain, there were a number of glasshouses, the last of which was destroyed by the hurricane of 1987.
A large lean-to vinery house, with a ventilation system similar to that used in sash windows, stood on the south of the wall which divides the garden. Grapes were grown on wires fixed to the glazing bars, while peaches were grown on the back wall. On the south facing wall of the garden and in other parts, remnants of whitewash can be seen where other glasshouses stood. Much of this was heated. The chimney of the boiler house stands behind the south facing wall. There were three boilers in total, all serving heating systems with heavy 4” cast iron pipes where the water moved round by convection. In the autumn, the car park was filled with heaps of coal brought from Saxmundham railway station by horse and cart. Clay flower pots, packed in straw, also arrived via the railway. The many holes that you can see in the wall were made by the nails which held the carefully trained fruit trees against the walls.
Following the First World War the purpose of the nursery changed from supplying the needs of the Estate to that of a thriving and independent commercial concern. Soft fruit, including peaches, figs and grapes were supplied to a considerable local area; bedding plants were regularly delivered to outlets such as Woolworth in Great Yarmouth and cut flowers assumed an increasing importance.
After the Second World War it was the cut flower trade, mostly Chrysanthemums, that became the mainstay of the nursery. The bulk of the produce was grown for sale at Covent Garden Market. However, there was a gradual decline in the fortunes of the nursery and the disrepair of the 1980's became dereliction by the time we took over in 1987. To make matters worse, the wall was damaged by the October hurricane and this was the site’s main feature built out of 300,000 red bricks which had been made from clay dug from the edge of what is now, the car park.
History
Before work began and the hurricane of 1987
We set to work to make a nursery in that year, first digging trenches for water pipes and electricity and soon after building polythene tunnels. Bit by bit, we cleaned up some of the fallen bricks, and lacking time to do a complete repair, opted to build a wooden greenhouse in the gap where the wall had fallen down. This we made from pitch-pine glasshouse sections which we bought second hand. Like most of the work on the nursery, we did all the work ourselves. Every year we had a project of improvement and having purchased the site in 1992, we were able to make a leap forward: building more glasshouses; repairing the entire wall; creating the garden; building our house; and finally replacing our original polytunnels with 850 square metres of modern glass with computer controlled ventilation and thermal screens to shield people from the sun’s heat in the summer and to act as additional insulation on cold nights.