Audley End, England ? A subtle bend in a high red brick wall holds a clue to the ingenuity built into the kitchen garden at one of Britain’s great stately homes.

“See that? It’s deliberate,” says head gardener Mike Thurlow. “The Victorians built it that way to trap the sun — that part of the wall warms up more quickly and fruit grown against it ripens earlier.

“They knew a thing or two, those Victorians.”

They’re still growing things the Victorian way at the kitchen garden of Audley End, a magnificent Jacobean mansion that once belonged to the aristocratic Braybrooke family.

With its regimented box borders, espalier fruit trees and giant, white-framed vine house, the 10-acre garden is a picture of Victorian order and good management.

But there is none of the arsenic, strychnine or lead that the Victorian gardener sometimes used against pests.

Today all the plants are grown organically, and part of the garden is a testbed for 21st century methods of non-chemical fruit production.

The Victorians used many natural methods — the agrochemical industry had yet to take off — so it’s been relatively easy to marry Victorian and organic methods, said Thurlow.

“The Victorians believed in what we believe in — look after the soil, and your crops will be good,” he said.

All the fruit, vegetables and herbs are the varieties grown in Victorian times — the latest cultivars are from 1899 — and Victorian cultivation methods are used, including careful crop rotation.

“We garden around about the 1850s — anyone from that time coming back now would recognize what we are doing,” said Thurlow.

THE RESTORED VINE HOUSE AT THE 19TH CENTURY kitchen garden at the Audley End estate in Essex, England, nurtures a variety of herbs, vegetables and flowers.

“This is not a pastiche, it is the real thing.”

First created in the 18th century, the area was originally known as Lady Portsmouth’s Garden and originally incorporated an orangerie. Legendary landscape architect Capability Brown sited it between the park and the home farm when he designed Audley End’s gardens in the 1760s.

The garden came to real prominence in early Victorian times, when every stately home had an walled kitchen garden that provided produce throughout the year.

After World War II, Audley End House was sold to the Ministry of Works, predecessor of the conservation group English Heritage. In the 1990s, English Heritage restored the garden with the help of the Henry Doubleday Research Association, an organic group. The garden reopened to the public in 1999.

The early 19th century vinehouse — at 170 feet (57 meters) one of the longest in Britain — had been removed and had to be rebuilt, frame by frame. Apart from the vines, some of which are believed to be nearly 200 years old, it now grows aubergines, tomatoes, peppers and ornamental plants.

In Victorian times, a cleverly designed boiler circulated warm water through the vinehouse without the use of electricity or fancy valves; today, in a small concession to modernity, there are electric heaters.

In keeping with the original Victorian layout, gravel paths have been laid out and edged with more than 2 miles (3.2 kms) of box plants. Espalier fruit trees — trained to grow on wire frames against walls — line the vegetable and cut flower beds.

The rebuilt orchard house, a large greenhouse, is awash with figs, peaches, cherries, peaches and pears and some vegetables.

Along one side grow varieties from the HDRA’s seed library of Victorian varieties — many of which face extinction — with exotic names like “Pear Josephine de Malines 1830” and “Plum Cool Golden Drop 1790.” Thurlow proudly points out a Victorian pea variety that is seldom seen.

In all, the garden has 85 varieties of apples, 45 types of pears and 10 cherry varieties. Other unusual plantings include whitecurrants, prized by the Victorians, but overlooked now.

The current gardeners have followed the Victorian practice of planting one area of fruit, another of vegetables, with flowers and herbs separate. Vegetable crops are carefully grouped and rotated to prevent the soil becoming depleted, and peaches susceptible to leaf curl are protected with screens in the Victorian manner.

But instead of using arsenic or burnt laurel leaves — which release chemicals — today’s gardeners rely on ladybugs to kill aphids and release the parasite encarsia to finish off whitefly. Weeding is all done by hand.