About

Hi, my name is Mike Gilmore and before 1999 I had never done any gardening, knew nothing about gardening what-so-ever. Then I found a Victorian walled garden with the most amazing Victorian Greenhouses I had ever seen. My mother had been looking for a bungalow in the English countryside and I had accompanied my parent for an afternoon jaunt in the car, or so I thought. The reality proved very different.

We liked the bungalow interior, and then we went outside. OMG! Within yards of the back door we had to fight our way through the brambles and nettles. Over the next hour we ‘discovered’ derelict pig sties, old toilets and even a World War 2 storage hut to name just a few. And then we came across the Victorian Greenhouses.

They were a sight! Broken glazing and 9ft high nettles poking through the roof. It was easy to see why previous property viewers had turned and fled!

My mother’s enthusiasm was highly  infectious, and it didn’t take much to see where her thoughts were heading. . .

So I took myself off to give those mighty 14ft walls a thorough going over. Ivy or no ivy, they had to be checked out properly otherwise I could be repairing Victorian garden walls for ever! There was nothing wrong with them, not a brick or coping tile was out of place, they could last another hundred years. At the end of our visit, mum came across to me and asked “What do you think? Could you restore the Victorian greenhouses? Could you build the garden.”

“Sure, no problem.”

This web site tells our story. Over ten years gardening at Winsford my learning curve was near vertical! From the outset, when the excavator arrived to cut down the brambles and cut out a garden path we had to learn fast and work faster.

Winsford Walled Garden not only describes the development of a large modern flower garden from scratch. It also shows HOW we did it, WHY we did things the way we did, and offers countless new ideas, suggestions and practical tips for gardeners of every persuasion, young and not-so young.