At the end of April it is a heat wave and we are at the entrance to Gardens of the Borde Hill in the Backsonnne. “There are 13 different microclimas,” explains Jay Goddard, the new Chatelaine of the 2,300 hectare Sussex estate. “My great-grandfather bought the property in 1893 because in the early 1900s he passionately sponsored the great vegetable hunters and an ethos with the right plants, the right place of the right place that plants put plants in a mini and a mini-Himalaya. That is why we have a special collection.”
With us, Goddard's new employee is. She is not someone who will travel continents in search of exotic species. Quite the opposite. Chef Chantelle Nicholson is known for her localism and focuses on waste. Four months ago, she increased sticks from her Mayfair-Restaurant Apricity to carry out a project that she and Goddard, together with the garden designer Ann-Marie Powell, will take the next generation. These three women intend to determine the Cordia collective and intend to set the template for a completely circular, zero waste, “edimentally” (edible and decorative) garden and food project.
Real estate history extends to 1543; The house was built in 1598 by Stephen Borde, whose grandfather Andrew Borde was a doctor of King Henry VIII. In 1542 he wrote the first book about healing systems that is still in the house and is the basis of “Garden as a pharmacy”. Instead of letting the property view as a museum, the trio of women wants it to be a worldwide front, completely circular, circular complex for the food plant: a walled kitchen garden and market garden, restaurant, wine bar, bakery and two cafes.
Nicholson is the key to vision: the first chef female chef, who wins a Michelin -Green -Star in her treadwells restaurant, and then uses again for apricity, uses your circular approach to funding, seasonal, local food. With the selection of fruits on the farm of her uncle in New Zealand, she grew up and is happy to return to a life with natural miracles. Just yesterday she got up to bake for a group of bird watchers in the early morning, in the melody of a rousing dawn choir. “Reports a difference between Barbican and Lizzy,” she grins.
The future they build is based on the observation that experience, hospitality and sustainability are the interest zones for today's audience. While other goods do this in a high -end company (Raymond Blancs Le Manoir in Oxfordshire, the well -kept idealization of the Newt in Somerset), the Cordia Collective Vision of integrative -Nicholson wants local schools. “I don't understand how the most important thing you can do as a person are not taught at school,” she says. “Where the food comes from and how it is cooked should be the first thing you learn.”
While the new buildings are under construction, an existing bakery acts as a test kitchen. We are at the end of the magnolia season, and the dwarf taste of the petals has already inspired a magnolia and cinnamon confectioner. “There is so much that we can eat that we don't even know,” says Nicholson. “This is how Ann-Marie Powell is redesigned the kitchen garden. It won't look like a traditional vegetable garden-dahlias, tulips and astonishing color will be, but everything is edible.”
We are now going through a rose garden that inspires a view of syrups for the Cordia Pantry. But it is the hill of the wild garlic that Nicholson get up; In the bakery, Janine Edwards from London's Toplas bakery mixes in Cheddar -Scones, which deliciously warm, in the mouth, Janine Edwards from London's tinklas bakery.
Nicholson's arrival was a cultural shock for the locals. The first thing you should go was the coffee cups to take away, which were replaced by the recycling. Next were the packaged sandwiches, which are now freshly baked to order them. “I would like to see a worm so that children can see:” Look, a worm can eat orange peel and banana skin, but it cannot eat plastic -sandwich tablet. “The remaining milk was tipped into the sink, now it is processed for an asparagus and a milk focaccia to Ricotta while the whey is used in the scones. The coffee area?
Then came the billing for the laundry. Nicholson found someone who stuck the aprons in the dryer. “Why should you use the dryer? We have sun! It is efficiency from a business perspective and resource perspective. Take exactly what you need. That is the mentality.”
We enter the bakery kitchen to inspect the thyme pudding and roast rhubarb towns, and find Edwards an apple and engineer. She saves the crumbs to dry the Gingerbread gardeners' biscuits.
The walled kitchen garden is the core of the project. Nicholson's uncle expanded Cordia Cherry trees in his orchards, while “Cherry” Ingram, the wealthy English, who saved many of the Japanese flowers, donated various rare varieties for Borde Hill. A Cordia tree has just been planted from the wall in front of the gate, its branches above the Victorian brick. Inside, buildings for the restaurant, which will be opened in February, are hollowed out with a huge GLA box expansion, in which Nicholson gives and citrus fruits will grow.
The gardener Julia Burton plants Powell's designs in a biodynamic cosmos of air, water, fire and earth. “We have taglils that are delicious,” says Burton, “Snapdragons that taste like chicorée, and sanguisorba that look like raspberries on sticks – they can eat the young leaves and flowers. [We have] Dahlias, who were brought from Mexico before we got potatoes because you can eat the tubers, and Jerusalem artichokes that have the most fantastic high sunflowers. Such a wonderful coincidence of food and flower. ”
“We also have Valerian,” Nicholson breaks, “so that we can make seasonal infusions with fig leaves and nettles.” Then Burton and Nicholson are in the infrastructure talks and train: “What we can do Bokashi [compost]When food waste creates the compost to switch the circle. It is an ecosystem approach that closes the loop. How we involve circularity in the design.
“As someone who only worked in hospitality, it is another approach in a garden,” says Nicholson. “People have such an energy. To be able to learn from each other and talk about Sichuan pepper trees!”
Goddard looks at: “We concentrate on making food and nature more accessible because it is so important for the future. We are administrators of this amazing landscape, but we have the responsibility to ensure that it will still be here in another 130 years.”
Bordehill.co.uk
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