THE PIG at Combe

I do find that visiting a garden is all in the timing. We arrived at The Pig at late coffee time, just as the rain stopped, and I therefore declared the timing to be absolutely perfect.

The Pig at Combe is one stunningly beautiful house and garden in a chain of stunningly beautiful houses and gardens. I can still remember the first time I went to one of the originals, The Pig at Bath, set in deer parkland in the lovely bit of countryside south of Bath. It was like falling into a fantasy life. The house, stuffed to the rafters with old, velvet sofas, lines of wellington boots and long oak tables, was reached through a traditional walled garden.

The setting was glorious, and the food was wonderful. As much of it grown in the garden as possible, so much so that you can see gardeners harvesting and ferrying vegetables and leaves into the kitchen if you go at lunchtime. Everything else is sourced from 25 miles around.

So you can imagine, when I heard they were renovating an old hotel the other side of Honiton and opening a more local Pig, I was overjoyed. I go frequently, but not as often as I would like. I often have visions of myself, ensconced in a squashy sofa by an over-sized open log fire, typing my first novel whilst waiters flutter around asking if I would like coffee or cocktails. When asked about my ideal day by life coaches and the like, I describe this scenario, possibly with the addition of lunch and possibly a massage in the potting shed spa.

Indeed, I have tried this once. The piped music was sufficiently off-putting and I couldn’t concentrate, so I came home and typed blog posts (the first novel is still, like so many novels, in the liminal space between being imagined and written) in the studio instead. Also, Hugo misses me terribly if I am anywhere but home, and I miss him. An hour away from my spaniel is rarely an hour well-spent.

This is relevant but not relevant. The Pig holds a bigger place in my dream life than it does in reality. And what better way to embrace reality than to see behind the scenes?

On Wednesday afternoon, we followed one of the gardeners around the really interesting parts of the garden. We smelt things (Szechuan peppercorns and tagetes) and tased things (mulberries and oyster leaves). Firstly, and who doesn’t have one of these, the mushroom house. They use bales from Grocycle, a local company, to grow all sorts of incredible varieties in the old boiler house. Walled gardens will often have a long glasshouse on the sunny side of the wall and then a brick shed on the shady side. This would house boilers and heaters to pipe heat into the glasshouse, allowing the cultivation of melons and pineapples, even in the English climate. The glasshouse is now full of a huge grapevine and a kaffir lime tree, leaving the damp, dark boiler house free to be filled with funghi.

A little further on were the polytunnels. The gardener was very keen for us to admire the incredible rows of chillies, tomatoes and Padrón peppers and they were indeed very admirable, but I was more interested in sneaking off and sticking my head in the working tunnels. Lots of random pots, mixed herbs and shrubs, cuttings and a whole amphitheatre of tatty looking thyme. I fell in love with a purple chokeberry (Aronia × prunifolia). There were a few little ones in tiny pots and for the first time, I wished it was pouring with rain; I could have fitted one under a raincoat but not a tweed jacket.

Like all the best gardeners, our tour guide hinted that there was too much work and not enough workers. He said that all the Pig gardens are supplied by their own nursery who deliver vegetable and flower plug plants at exactly the right moment. I am so relieved when people who seem to have immaculate gardens turn out to be short cutting the process; I feel so incredibly guilty about cheating with a Rocket garden order.

And immaculate the gardens are. Beefy raised beds, arches made of steel for apple espaliers and from hazel (copied from The Newt after a staff outing apparently) for tromboncino squash.

At the top of the garden was a door marked private and the gardener spoke in hushed tones about the owners who lived on the other side. He said they were Canadians who were oblivious to the possibility of them inheriting a rolling 3,500 acre estate with a stately home until they received a phone call to say it had happened. Can you even imagine?

We all peered through a peephole in the door but saw nothing more scintillating than a hen pheasant who posed perfectly for a photo.

Down back into growing areas, it was time to get serious about cropping. When a chef relies on regular, tasty harvests, you don’t mess around with bits and pieces, you successionally grow long lines of the big hitters.

Three sorts of kale (Emerald Ice, Dazzling Blue and Redbor). Whole cages of winter cabbages covered in butterfly netting. A chard new to me, Peppermint, so named because the stalks look like long sticks of peppermint rock not because they taste like the sweets. And a chard wonderfully familiar, Fordhook Giant. The gardener raved about New Zealand spinach as the only spinach to grow. In New Zealand it is, rather confusingly known as English spinach.

[I took lots of photos like this to remind me of varieties to try. I forgot to take a notebook.]

And aside: I adore chard. It is so much easier to grow than cabbages, gets none of the whitefly or caterpillars of kale, is quicker and easier than spinach, and is cut and come again. We eat it every day pretty much all year round. It doesn’t travel well so you rarely see it in the shops, but that is all the more reason to put a bed of it in, somewhere near your back door. In the winter, I have little else in the garden.

Of course, if a garden is being harvested hard to feed a restaurant, it needs feeding itself. There is a sense of the old-fashioned here and the solution to nourishing the soil is, rather unsurprisingly, muck. Well-rotted manure is used to keep the beds productive. Almost all of the growing space within the walled garden is raised beds as a way of managing the clay soil, and keeping them healthy and fed is a full time job.

Rather wonderfully, there is also time spent on maintaining a ecosystem within the walls; there are bee hotels and flowers for pollinators which, this being The Pig, are also scattered on puddings and in cocktails. Nasturtiums popped up in unexpected places, and alpine strawberries crept across gravel. When asked what his biggest challenge was, the gardener rather ruefully said “pheasants”. And if I were a pheasant, I’d probably move into the kitchen garden too.

We were led through the fruit cages, complete with a whole row of fruitful fig trees, back to the cedar lawn and the folly. The folly would be a wonderful building on its own, but now it houses a huge wood fired pizza oven and a massive coffee machine and I love it even more. We celebrated the beauty of the setting and the dodging of the rain with pizzas topped with fresh and fermented kitchen garden produce, and a mocktail brewed out of apple mint.