The garden at the Printer’s Workshop

The garden is typical of an 1840s lower middle-class home, with its hexagonal summer house and its green-painted picket fence which separates the garden from the paved courtyard. Woodsheds, outdoor privies, stables and workshops would often be found in the courtyards of the towns.

The garden at the Printer’s Workshop is divided into four growing beds that provided the home with crops. Vegetables such as chard, radishes, beetroot, runner beans, Jerusalem artichokes and rhubarb are grown here. The summer house is framed by small boxwood and peonies, as well as masterwort, Christmas roses and ostrich fern.

It was also common at this time to grow fruit on trellised trees to make maximum use of the outdoor space. There were several advantages. The trees did not grow too big and therefore did not shade the crops, and hard pruning allowed a lot of fruit to be grown in a small area. Today, the garden has two trellised fruit trees: an apple tree and a pear tree.

A socially divided garden
On a farmstead where there were several homes, the garden usually belonged to only one of the homes. The gate to the garden would then be kept locked, and the other tenants had to eat or socialise in the courtyard. The fence around the garden thus represents not only a functional division, but also a social one.