Volunteer, Jan Black, has taken on an ambitious project at the castle. This is her summary of the story so far and of things to come.
How did it all begin?
For the last four years groups of pupils from Claremont School have been working on garden projects with Bodiam Castle. What started as a fairly modest idea of creating a herb bed in the grounds has now become an ambitious plan to establish all 101 plants that are mentioned in one of the oldest English gardening manuscripts, The Feate of Gardening, written in about 1390, the same time that Bodiam Castle was built.
The Claremont and dyeing gardens
In 2012 we created a herb garden containing plants for cooking, for the household, for strewing and freshening, for medicine and healing, and for well-being. This was followed in 2013 with a bed of plants used for dyeing, and in 2014 with a bed of ornamental plants for scent and savour.
The seed is sown
During research for possible plants to include we came across many references to ‘The Feate of Gardening’. We contacted the library at Trinity College Cambridge where the original manuscript is held and they kindly provided a copy. It is written in verse and includes a list of 89 ‘Main Herbes’ and reference to a further twelve plants. With the aid of this and other reference books we discovered we had more than half the plants mentioned either in the beds or growing wild in the castle grounds.
And begins to grow
So the 2015 project was born – to try to establish the remaining 45. We have sourced all of them either as plants or seeds, and, provided the seeds all germinate and the ordered plants all arrive, are optimistic that by the end of the year we will have achieved something quite unique; all the plants on one site where the building is the same age as the manuscript.
