Within These Walls

Yesterday I presented you with A Bunch Of Tulips without telling you where I'd been to pick them - metaphorically photographically picked them of course; I'd have found myself in trouble if I'd actually factually picked them. To find so many flowers you have to go somewhere special, somewhere like this....

or like this....

or perhaps even this.....

The irony is that this garden was never meant to be walked around and admired even though thousands of people must do it every year these days. We are at the National Trust's Wimpole Hall, which is just a half-hour-or-so's bicycle ride from my back door, and we're in the walled garden which was originally intended to produce food for the table of the great house and cut-flowers for arrangements to beautify its many rooms.

The walls, which are about twelve feet (3.65 metres) high are to shelter the garden from the cold winds and create a micro-climate that's ideal for gardening. Yesterday, when it was so blustery that I had to fight with the bike's handlebars just to stay on the road, was an ideal day to test its efficacy and I'm pleased to say it passed the test.

Today the garden is kept in shape by a couple of gardeners and a large army of volunteers, their gardening gloves making an unlikely and unintended display in the large glasshouse...

Almost as colourful as the flowers!

The walls of the garden do not only provide protection for the flowers, vegetables, windswept cyclists and volunteer gardeners; they also protect and support the espaliered fruit trees.

Those are cherries growing in the photo above. That may well be a "hot wall", that is a wall with flues within it to carry heat from a furnace to speed the growing and ripening of the fruit.

....and I think these were pears.

What else to show you?

Just outside the walls, but still to some extent sheltered by them, were these tiny miniature tulips growing in amongst the cowslips.

And just in case you think it's all tulips here.....

Take care.