Bring your own scarecrow, and place it in our beautiful garden. Prizes for the best design, most creative costume and most lifelike scarecrow. Children must be accompanied by an adult over 18. Refreshments available on the day.
Guy’s Cliffe, a large sandstone outcrop towering above the River Avon and surrounded by woodland, has been the subject of romantic legends and myths for many centuries. Whatever the truths and realities of those stories, the site and the nearby water mill have certainly been inhabited since before William the Conqueror came to our shores.
In its earliest days, Guy’s Cliffe was a religious site having close associations with Warwick Castle and St Mary’s Church. In Tudor times a fine country house was built and this was later replaced by a Georgian mansion as more land was acquired and Guy’s Cliffe developed into a substantial country estate.
In its heyday, Guy’s Cliffe saw more than its fair share of drama and tragedy as it passed through the hands of a succession of influential and powerful families who were known across the country, Europe and beyond. Our particular interest is how the history of the walled garden is intrinsically linked to that of the house and the families who lived there.
The walled garden was part of the kitchen garden that supported Guy’s Cliffe House. The kitchen garden extended to about 3 acres, with the walled section being about 2/3rds of an acre. The walled garden would have been used particularly for growing fruits and vegetables that needed the protection of the walls, which form a micro-climate for tender plants. Fruit trees were grown against the walls taking advantage of the warming effect of the sun on the bricks.
The earliest reference to the site of the walled garden that we have so far found is from a map dated 1773 when the land is described as being in use as a garden. At this time, the house was owned by Samuel Greatheed, MP for Coventry and a wealthy landowner. We do not know whether the walls were in place at that time but they had certainly been built by the early 1800s. A close look at their construction shows that it is unlikely they were built at the same time and were substantially altered at different times in their history.
Samuel left the estate to his son Bertie and during his ownership substantial development work took place in and around the garden. Between 1806 and 1826, Bertie spent a great deal of time and money on his estate and this included making many changes to the gardens. His diary of 1806 includes a line drawing of the walled garden which provides the first indication of the layout of the paths. It also lists which trees he had planted on espalier posts alongside them.
Bertie Greatheed also had the peach house and vinery built in the 1820s, copying a design used at Barford Hill House a few miles away, and had the garden walls altered so that he could grow more fruit trees against them. He boasted that he had half a mile of walls under cultivation. Another of Bertie’s projects was the ornamental canal that used to run along the outside of the west wall of the garden. The canal is now filled in but it could still be seen as recently as the 1960s.
After Bertie’s death, the house and grounds were inherited by his granddaughter Ann Caroline and her husband, Lord Charles Percy. It was during their time that the garden probably had its best days. Certainly, Guy’s Cliffe garden was particularly successful at local and county horticultural shows winning many prizes for fruits, vegetables and flowers. The Ordnance Survey map of 1889 shows that the paths and beds defined by Bertie Greatheed, and the glasshouses built by him, were still in place and the garden was essentially as Bertie had left it in 1826.
The garden continued to provide for the owners of Guy’s Cliffe until the late 1940s when the estate was broken up and the main house eventually became a ruin. The kitchen garden was acquired by a market gardener, Mr Harwood, who worked the site until about 1960 when Hinton Brothers, a long-established Warwick nursery business, moved in. Hintons built some large glass houses on the two main beds at the north end of the walled garden but also used the old peach house and melon house for cultivation. The rest of the walled garden was used for growing annual and perennial plants for sale in the nursery. As recently as the early 1980s, the walled garden was still being used in this way but over the years it fell into disuse and quickly became overgrown. By 2014, when restoration work began, the garden was a jungle of tall brambles, established trees and ivy which had covered all the walls. Nothing was left of the pathways and the beds. A fire had caused considerable damage to the peach house so that only half of the original building was left and this, along with the melon house, quickly became derelict.
Bring your own scarecrow, and place it in our beautiful garden. Prizes for the best design, most creative costume and most lifelike scarecrow. Children must be accompanied by an adult over 18. Refreshments available on the day.
Donations in aid of Macmillan Cancer Trust. Enjoy coffee and cake in this lovely garden, and support this wonderful charity.
Coffee and Cakes for sale on the day of the event.
Entry to the garden is free, but the suggested donation in aid of Macmillan is £5.
Come and explore interesting crafts and techniques, all with a botanical theme, in a beautiful setting. Crafts on display to enjoy and buy will include Soap and Candles, Felting, Jewellery, Surface Printing, Ceramics, Photography and Acrylics. There will also be demonstrations of Spinning and Wood Turning. Refreshments available
Wednesday & Friday
10.00am-3.30pm
Saturday
1.30-3.30pm
Sunday
10.30am-3.30pm
Access & parking via
Hintons Nursery,
Coventry Road,
Guy’s Cliffe,
Warwick CV34 5FJ
