Dwarf Orchard Pictures
Have you noticed that there are virtually no pictures of the Dwarf Orchard? I don’t just mean on the internet, I mean full-stop. I’ve ploughed through books old and new and – zilch. Not even old photos or drawings of how it would have been in its heyday.
I’m not saying there aren’t any – just that I can’t find them. I think I found two online. When that little flurry of work that started back in the spring began (which, if any of the organisers are reading, many of us couldn’t make because it was on a weekday, not because we didn’t care…) I had hoped for a few in the local papers.
Now admittedly I don’t get the local papers, so I have to either look at other people’s or go to the library, and, hands up, I don’t always bother (I know, I know, I’m missing thrills and excitement beyond imagination…) but the only pics I saw were closeups of the people doing the clearing, which is nice, but…
Maybe there isn’t much to see, maybe it looks exactly the same as every other bit of abandoned formal garden gone back to nature (the best of those, BTW, is the fabulous Warley Place in Essex, about a 25 minute drive away near Brentwood – where wild flowers and creepers have almost entirely consumed the crumbling mansion, leaving tantalising, ferny caves, mosaic-ed floors, sunken rooms and my favourite walled garden ever – seventy/thirty wild/formal.) But I still want to know what’s behind those walls.
I’m sure I was once sent some plans of what they intend for the place – but I can’t find them. One thing I read was that it was going back, as far as possible, to being formal, another that it was being turned into the dreaded ‘community garden.’ Anyone who’s ever been to Warley might make the argument to more or less leave it as it is, controlled chaos.
Julia lives opposite, and promised to send me some pics, taken from pretty much literally over the wall. We have her to thank for these first images of what’s inside what has to be Greenwich Park’s most secret area.
For the moment, these are the best we’ll get. There’s definitely been some clearing; I don’t know if it’s still going on or it’s stalled (hope not…) I would like to know if there’s anything of the original left – bits of masonry – very old fruit trees – formal plants gone wild – hard to see from these pics, lovely as they are.
Did anyone join in with the volunteers in the Spring? I’d love to know what’s there, what’s planned, what’s happening…
[...] from two posts by our local ghost (here and here) and a bit of PR from 2009 I know very little about this bit of land at the bottom of the [...]