Primroses flower beneath a tangle of brambles on the sun-warmed hedge at the bottom of a former market garden in the Cleave valley.  Chunks of wood and brash (rough-cut branches) strew the south-facing slope, interspersed with frost-withered hart’s-tongue, self-sown ash, and plastic tubes guarding deciduous saplings.  The National Trust and volunteers are planting these to replace larch felled because of the threat of disease (Phytophthora ramorum).  Thirty-year-old tree trunks have been dragged out and carted away for chipboard, stakes and firewood.  Others are being burned in the woodchip boiler that heats a nearby glasshouse nursery. 

The old packing house, where seasonal fruit pickers would live in the area’s market garden days.  Photograph: Jack Spiers

The last grower to cultivate the amalgam of plots comprising Hearn’s Wood, Brake and Boars Bridge retired in 1984.  After the usual tenant-right valuation, when the worth of improvements and costs of dilapidations (the repairs required at the end of a tenancy) were assessed, this part of the Cotehele estate was planted with larch.  The sunny slope became engulfed by trees, obvious in autumn when the brilliant yellows contrasted with old, lichen-covered deciduous woodland on the opposite shady side.  Today, the only indications of intensive cultivation are a few clumps of hardy daffodils like Magnificence, Fortune and Helio, growing on the edge of the felled plantation and among faded snowdrops on banks of the lane at the top of the slope. 

The surviving packing house, with its ivy-covered chimney, was lived in by part-time fruit pickers before the second world war and later became a daytime base for the last gardener and his wife.  For more than 20 years they made a living on five and a half acres of this extremely steep but early ground, growing a succession of anemones (picked during winter and onwards into spring), violets, early daffodils, cabbage, lettuce and strawberries.  Their plough had to be winched uphill, as did slumped soil; cultivation, planting, manuring, spraying, watering and harvesting were all done by hand, as the land was too steep for machinery.  Few now produce outdoor fruit, flowers and vegetables here, but across the hill the local organic farmer has planted a field of broad beans under fleece.