History of the Walled Garden

As part of the National Lottery Heritage Fund project, the undocumented history of the walled garden, which Growing Sudley has brought back to life, and the greenspaces generally at Sudley was explored.

Above are are the only two photographs of the walled garden that have been found to date. It was first thought that the walled garden had been the kitchen garden for the house, but the evidence suggests it was mainly an ornamental space used to grow and display botanicals and enjoy leisure walks. The map above shows glasshouses (in crosshatching) along the walls of the garden as expected, but also glasshouses in the area behind the garden, and it is now thought this is where most of the day to day fruit and veg was grown. The Britain From Above photograph shows the very corner of the walled garden with some kind of summer house or similar structure but no further evidence was found.

The glasshouses that ran the length of the south facing wall would likely have contained exotic plants, fruits and colonial acquisitions, some tender vegetables and certainly the Holts’ precious orchid collection. Like many Victorian gardeners, the Holts loved to grow orchids, priceless examples of which had been accumulated over the years from rarities brought to the port overseas from all over the globe. Sadly, no photographs of the glasshouses have ever been found, except some footage within the Main Street Mersey travelogue in the BFI archives, where Blackwood Dalgliesh, head orchid grower for the city in 1955, can be seen inside the glasshouses at Sudley. (This footage is currently unavailable to view on the BFI website.)

The Historic Glasshouses

The Holts made the most of what would have been cutting edge technology at the time to build and heat glasshouses with double skinned hot walls or flue wall, which enabled them to extend the growing season in the walled garden.

According to a heritage report commissioned by Growing Sudley in 2018, the hot wall remaining at Sudley is ‘an unusual and increasingly rare construction type, and in good condition’. There are three different types of wall construction in the garden, pertaining to developments and alterations made by the two historic owners. And judging from the photograph of the garden above, there was a fourth much lower wall which was at some point destroyed.

You can read the heritage report here.

An extensive orchid collection was cultivated by the Holts in the walled garden and was later transferred to Botanic Gardens and then Croxteth Park, becoming part of the world renowned ‘Liverpool Collection’.

On 20 Nov 1940, a bomb meant for railway marshalling yards missed and shattered the glasshouses of the Liverpool Botanic Gardens. The plants inside were shredded and, as it was winter, all the surviving plants were hurriedly moved into nearby private glasshouses and the orchids moved back to Sudley House. They were later moved to Greenhill Nursery and then to Harthill at Calderstones.