In a country whose historiography is marked by binary oppositions – Welsh-speaking/ English speaking, chapel/ church, rural/ urban, nationalist/ unionist etc. – narratives that don’t neatly belong to either pole run the risk of falling through the cracks. Such is the case with the history of apple cultivation in Wales, which I explored in Apples of Wales, and such is perhaps also the case when we come to urban gardening in Wales: an activity neither in any ordinary sense urban, but not rural either, and not belonging to any common historiography of Welsh food.
Nevertheless, urban and peri-urban horticulture is longstanding feature of the Welsh townscape and landscape. There is nothing exceptional in fact this when considered on a European scale, with urban orchards and productive gardens surrounding the cities of Europe from London to Seville and from Stuttgart to Constantinople from the Middle Ages until the ubiquity of cheap fossil fuels transformed urban life and made them redundant. Welsh towns were during this period all small by European standards, with only Haverfordwest, Wrexham, Carmarthen and Cardiff at various points even approaching what in other contexts would be considered a medium-sized market town. But there was nothing exceptionally un-urban about Welsh society before 1800, and beyond their size there was not much that was exceptional about the Welsh townscape – which included gardens and orchards.
With the military conquest of Wales complete at the beginning of the 13th century, the presence of peace permitted town development. The Welsh townscape became one characterized not only characterized by markets, churches and pubs, but also by the presence of ‘barns, cowsheds, pinfolds, dovecotes and mills, gardens and orchards within urban precincts.’ The presence of the latter is firmly testified first and foremost by records of complaints when ‘pigs and goats ran amok in poorly fenced curtilages and destroyed fruit trees and vegetable beds’.[1]
Much of this work would have been done by women, who worked also worked as innkeepers, shop-keepers and much else during this period. Of 460 deeds relating to the town of Haverfordwest during the 14th-16th centuries, around 70 were granted to or by women, acting in their own capacities.[2] The tantalizing glimpse into the ownership of Gardd y Berllan (‘orchard garden’)in St Asaph in the 1390s fits into this picture – it was owned by two women called Gwenllian and Tangwystl, who between them owned 24 rods of inherited land.[3]
Many of these gardens in the foremost Welsh towns were monastic in ownership. Cardiff had its Blackfriars and Greyfriars on land now covered by Bute Park and Cathays Park respectively. Speed’s 1610 map of Cardiff shows the streets surrounded by plots on which stand trees – undoubtedly productive orchard trees for the most part. Haverfordwest and Carmarthen were also dominated by monastic institutions, and these well-networked institutions are likely to have been responsible for seeing new cultivation techniques and crops introduced into the Welsh gardening scene.
It has been demonstrated in detail by Thirsk and others that gardening in England during the early modern period was characterized by change and the whims of fashion as much as economic pressures. There is no reason to suppose that this was not also the case in Wales, but the constant that underlies this change throughout the long centuries until the industrial revolution is the presence of those gardens and their place in the Welsh townscape. By the time of Walter Davies’ reports into agriculture in South Wales as published in the 1810s, the most important centre of market gardening in the Cardiff area had become Llandaff:
‘The kitchen-gardens of the market-men at Llandaff, near Cardiff, are numerous and productive ; supplying the most convenient parts of South Wales, and in a certain proportion the Bristol market, with vegetables : such a group of gardens for the accommodation of the public, we have not noticed elsewhere within the district. To enumerate the several articles of the first-rate gardens, would be to write in part a botanical dictionary : the crops of a farmer’s- garden consist of the vegetables most appropriate to his table, viz. early potatoes, yellow turnips, early and winter cabbages, greens, varieties of pease and beans, carrots, onions, and other alliaceous plants, and varieties of salads; to which some add brocoli, cauliflowers, asparagus, seakale, rhubarb.’
The range of vegetables listed here is by Davies’ own admission only a part of what was known and grown. The presence of asparagus and salads on his list may go some way to dispelling some tired notions of historic Welsh fare. More telling still in this context are his remarks that ‘such a group of gardens’ are not seen elsewhere in the district, implying that although the Llandaff market gardens were exceptional in their extensiveness, that nevertheless single market gardens existed in other parts of South Wales, not to mention private garden and orchard plots.
This picture is given more detail by the records pertaining to the land behind Furnace house in Carmarthen a decade later. According to the lease document held by the National Library of Wales,
‘On the 25th Jan 1819 Charles Morgan Esq of Furnace house leases the substantial garden there to John Adams Gardener ‘together with the Hothouse, Peach House, Pinepits, Melonpits, Melon and Cucumber Pits & Frames Hand [Glasses] and everything therein contained, Summer House, sheds, Gardeners Lodge [Hand Glasses] together with and the use of all the pots plants (and) Garden Tools & garden Implements are now used in the said Gardens Green House Hot Houses, House and premises….also rendering and delivering unto the aid Charles Morgan his Heirs or assigns yearly as duties during the said term three of the largest and best Pineapples, a Basket of the Choicest Grapes viz Muscat of Alexandria, Gemaine Tokay, Black Damascus and [Prontiniae] a basket of the choicest grapes in muscat of Alexandria, a specimen also specimens of the choicest wallfruit, the same fruit to be rendered on the 2nd day of August in each year (being the Birthday of Master Rob t Morgan)’[4]
The range of fruit grown, including varieties of grape well regarded for their flavour to this day, and pineapples (!) melons and peaches, implies a high level of gardening skill. The requirement to deliver some of these as part of the rent to the wily landowner implies a discerning palate and sneaky mind on his part! This land is now covered by the municipal car-park behind Carmarthen Library.
What salience does this brief sketch have? Wales’ population is now more urban than at any point in the past. Poor diet and lack of time outside amongst greenery have both in different ways become increasingly recognized as significant contributing factors to poor physical and mental health. Food production is one of the primary causes of global carbon emissions. Urban gardening presents itself as a partial but strategic solution to all three problems, as well as contributing to the liveability of urban spaces and could be part of a wider rebirth of Welsh agriculture. A renaissance of urban growing in Wales would be an enterprise with deep roots and the potential to contribute in numerous ways to the quality of life of Wales’ townspeople and city-dwellers.
Ripostes to this are usually quick off the mark, but to argue that no significant quantities of food can be produced in this way is to ignore the evidence of the vast majority of humanity’s collective urban experiences throughout history, who produced serious quantities of organic fruit and vegetables for centuries in urban and peri-urban contexts. This, as outlined above, was no less true in Wales than elsewhere – and with a warming climate, Charles Morgan’s Carmarthen peaches and melons become an even more worthwhile endeavour.
The second common riposte to this vision usually refers to some desire to revert to a peasant existence. But to argue that providing widespread urban growing (employment) opportunities would be undesirable when compared to the current is to posit that a desk-based existence or one as a zero-hour delivery driver is for almost everyone preferable to toil in the (urban) fields: an assertion unlikely to be supported by the evidence.
Of course, good work is already happening in this field, and the barriers to a true renaissance are significant – business models, land prices and the economics of food production currently pose real obstacles. But a perception that urban growing has no place in Welsh townscapes should not be one of them.
Select Bibliography
Walter Davies, Agricultural Survey of South Wales (1814)
Joan Thirsk, Food in Early Modern England (London: Continuum, 2006)
Ed. Helen Fulton, Urban Culture in Medieval Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2012)
Carwyn Graves, Apples of Wales (Llanrwst: Carreg Gwalch, 2018)
[1] 24, ‘In search of an Urban Identity’ in Urban Culture in Medieval Wales
[2] 175, ‘The townswomen of Wales’ in Urban Culture in Medieval Wales
[3] 25, Apples of Wales
[4] NLW Griffith Owen Collection 25123 – with kind thanks to Sara Fox for sharing this, and to Hannah Jones for the transcription.