Garden Walls

 

The superb condition of the Victorian English Garden Walls at Winsford Walled Garden was a decisive factor in our decision to make it our home. The coping tiles, weighing 20kg each, are in perfect condition and were made from moulds poured with blast furnace slag and impervious to water. They provided the best protection against the worst British winter weather and remain the single most influential factor in the present excellent condition of the garden walls.

Reaching 12ft of twelve feet (3.7m) and extending hundreds of feet, many garden walls were magnificent structures in their own right. At Winsford the walls are undamaged and unbroken, with no cement involved, they have no expansion joints. Instead, because lime mortar was used, the garden walls are able to ‘breathe’ naturally, to expand and contract as they need.

Garden wall construction

Building a long, high wall is an expensive undertaking for every property owner regardless of the era in which they live. The first economy every garden owner can make is to save transport costs and use local materials.

One very early idea adopted to save money was to put curves in the wall in a serpentine fashion, so that on plan, the garden walls looked ‘corrugated’. In the 1700′s this had the effect of making a stronger wall for any given height.

Back in the early 1880′s when Winsford Walled Gardens were being built local stone was also used. But with a difference. In Winsford’s case, the owner had so much land and so much money, they set up a small quarry business on their property and made even more money!

Back to the garden walls. The local stone not only provided the foundations, it was also used at the base of the walls up to a height of about four feet, where the wall needed to be thickest and therefore was most expensive per linear foot.

In the second photo you can see the top of the stone line running behind my mother’s head, at which point the garden brickwork begins.

The local stonework then continued right to the top at the back/outside of the wall and was thus used to support the much more expensive inner face of brick shown.

The reason why the stonework did not continue to the top of the wall to save even more money can be seen in the third photo taken during the initial clearance work. It is impossible to incorporate even straight lines of vine eyes in natural stone. Nice regular runs of bricks are needed, the vine eyes being laid down into the wet mortar as building work proceeds.

But the walls at Winsford Walled Gardens are an engineering masterpiece. The stone walling emerged from the foundations to around 4 ft in height. Then the front of the stone walling stopped for the brick work to commence. BUT the rear of the stone walls continued to the top behind and reinforcing the brick garden walls.

If that was not enough, about every 30ft massive stone butttresses were built behind the tallest sections of walling.

Pictured left: The Victorian garden walls at Winsford used stone to support the brick face work inside. Note the buttresses behind.

Special Heat-retentive Brick
The brickwork used at Winsford also benefitted from surprising heat retentive properties. Pick up one of Winsfords bricks in one hand and a modern ‘engineering brick’ in the other and you will immediately notice the difference. The engineering brick is a noticeable 30% lighter  for the near-identical size of brick. Each Winsford brick weighed 10Ibs (4.5kg).

Long before we got the opportunity to find any loose bricks, we discovered the extent of heat that could be stored in such a massive structure. After we had cleared the ivy off the wall face (in the third photo the roots still need to be removed) we found it ‘tortuous’ to work within 10 feet of the wall on a sunny day, especially after 2-3 successive sunny days. We were so amazed by this, (we were in England after all), that I put a thermometer in the wall about arms length above my head at around 9.30pm at night – just as we were turning in. The next morning I discovered that the thermometer reached a maximum temperature of 140F and a minimum temperature of 110F!!

Garden Walls – Brickwork Bond

Brickwork bond can be defined as the layout of the bricks across the face of a wall. The long face of a brick is known as the stretcher face, so the most common brickwork bond seen everywhere is known as ‘Stretcher Bond‘. Its no coincidence that stretcher bond is the weakest and the cheapest brickwork of all. Not only does it use minimal materials it is also the quickest to lay.

The ends of a brick are known as the ‘Heads’. Thus, the brick bond seen under many railway arches with just the ‘heads’ of the bricks visible is known as header bond. Header bond is one of the the strongest and the most brick intensive brick bonds of all.

English Bond is most definitely the strongest and one of the most intensive brick bonds of all. It’s also one of the most difficult to lay. (Just see when you get to a junction and you need ‘king closures’ for example). English bond is made with alternating courses of header bond and stretcher bond.

For English garden wall engineers English Bond was definitely the way to go in the 1800′s’. But the wealthy owners who wanted walls hundreds, even thousands of feet long in total not surprisingly kicked up a fuss about the enormous expense. The Victorian engineer’s solution was a brick bond that married the economy of Stretcher bond with the undoubted strength of Header bond. The new bond design was a variation English Bond, made up of five courses of economical stretcher bond, then every sixth course was a course Header bond. It was only used in Garden walls and became known as English Garden Wall Bond.

Pictured left: English Bond. Pictured right: English Garden Wall Bond.

Look for it in the next walled garden you visit.

Letting the sun in
The photographs above feature the north and east walls. Please note carefully that the wall commonly known as the ‘south-facing’ wall is very often the north wall. OK, moving on. A big problem in a walled garden with 14ft high walls all around, is that during the winter months, when the sun is very low and weak, there’s a very real danger that even that weak sun won’t get inside the walls for long enough to even thaw the ground from one day to the next.

The simple answer, found by those most pragmatic Victorian garden engineers, was to make the west and south walls lower. At Winsford Walled Garden the North and East walls are 14ft (4.3m), while the south and west walls are 9ft (2.7m).

When Mike Gilmore arrived at Winsford Walled Garden, he, like so many gardeners, believed that the garden walls that created a walled garden were originally built to protect the exotic plantings within from the weather. But following their first winter spent inside the ‘protective walls’ the reality of this protection could not be further from the truth. By which time Mike had evidence enough from his numerous Victorian discoveries within the garden that the Victorians were a very practical and pragmatic generation. After finding nothing in his garden that did not have at least two reasons for being there. He began to rethink the reasons for building a garden with walls that did NOT protect the plants from the weather, that in reality, the swirling winds inside the walls had very opposite effect!

For more pages on garden walls click here

Read the real reasons why the Victorians built walled gardens.