For the first time since coming to the house, I have a kitchen garden. It may be small, but to me it is a thing of beauty and delight. And while this was not the best year for making a start on being self-sufficient in fruit and veg, it did keep us in French beans, salad and courgettes all summer, which I was thrilled about. After all, a single courgette at the local supermarket can cost more than a bunch of bananas that have come halfway round the world. Salad leaves not only come in an unrecyclable plastic bag but also have an incredibly short shelf life and 40 per cent of the contents end up being thrown away because they don’t survive the first serving (according to figures from government waste advisory body WRAP).

I am hardly original in enjoying my little veg patch because kitchen gardens have been documented in Britain since the Roman invasion and were common in medieval monastic and manorial gardens. The Tudors grew medicinal herbs among their fruit trees and vegetables, believing in their power to treat all manner of ailments: for example, a mixture of lavender, marjoram and sage was commonly used to treat headaches, chamomile was grown for stomach aches and feverfew for soothing colds and fevers – the garden was more of a dispensary than a food source.

The rise of the formal garden in the seventeenth century, with its symmetrical designs, geometric shapes and ornate features such as fountains, statues, and topiary, meant that the kitchen gardens on large estates became larger and more formalised, too, with walled enclosures and carefully laid out beds to help maintain optimum growing conditions. While herbs continued to be a mainstay of the vegetable garden, it now also included cabbages, peas, beans and root vegetables.

As the palates of the country gentry grew more sophisticated in the 1700s, grand country estates began to heat the walls of their kitchen gardens with flues or hot water pipes to extend the growing season and allow for the cultivation of exotic fruits such as pineapples, melons and peaches. For the less well off, the first allotments were set up in the 1790s, as starvation wages, post-war food shortages and disastrous harvests brought rural society to its knees. A century on, in the 1870s, a distinct shift of emphasis showed allotments had become not just a means of feeding hungry families but also a strategy for keeping men out of the alehouse.
The Victorians’ love of innovation led to new technologies such as specialised glasshouses for bringing on melons, cucumbers, pineapples and vines, enabling the wealthy to enjoy strawberries and French beans even in the depths of winter. Extraordinary ingenuity went into producing food all year round, including vegetable crop rotation systems – recently revived at Cornwall’s Lost Gardens of Heligan.

When the men marched off to war in 1914, many of these great walled gardens fell into decline but it became boom time to grow your own. With supplies being cut off by German blockades, everyone had to do their bit, and even the geraniums at Buckingham Palace were replaced by cabbages. When Britain was back at war in 1939, the Ministry of Agriculture sprang into action and the Dig for Victory campaign was born. Nothing was left to chance: pamphlets showed novice gardeners how to hold a spade, dig a trench, and sow seeds.