I am delighted to announce that I have been appointed as the new Kitchen gardener. For those of you who visited the gardens earlier this year, you will appreciate the scale of the project ahead of me.

Whilst this will be a very physically demanding position, the reward of restoring this once thriving enterprise is like enticing a horse with a carrot.

It should come as no surprise that a certain amount of housekeeping was required before I could turn my attention to the nuts and bolts of gardening. Broken glass, metal, old plant pots, broken machinery and a variety of plastic materials in all shapes and sizes were amongst the rubbish that made up the 8 heaped trailers that were removed from the area.