By Tilly Walder
Last Tuesday I visited Ventnor Botanic Garden, proclaimed Britain’s hottest garden and home to more than 30,000 rare and sub-tropical plants and trees. Living on a small Island, I believe it’s important to know what is available locally, in terms of both experiences and local produce.
With this in mind, I visited the garden to investigate their garden-to-table process, to really find out what they offer. So I spent the day with the garden’s chef, Michael Jackson.
We didn’t start the day in the garden. Instead, we crossed the road to visit the eucalyptus grove, planted by garden-owner, John Curtis, within the first few years of him taking over the gardens in 2012. There are around 150 trees in the grove and in the spirit of sustainability, even the tree bark that sheds in the winter is collected and used as kindling for fires. On the topic of sustainability, Michael said: “Nothing gets wasted if we can help it. John (Curtis) is all over sustainability, even down to our coffee cups; both the cup and the lids are fully biodegradable.”
Harvesting the leaves from a eucalyptus tree is a challenge involving very tall ladders and secateurs. However, many of the garden’s products rely on eucalyptus leaves as key ingredients, such as the eucalyptus cordial, gin and the highly-anticipated tea, now in its experimentation phase. Despite the tea being in the works for only four to five months, three whole trees have been harvested for their leaves. These are chopped finely, run through a dehydrator and shipped to the tea blender to be blended with verbena and lemongrass. There is no machine that can be used to cut the leaves, so the only option is long, hard labour hand-chopping. I tried my hand at this and found it a lot more difficult than I expected! However, the sweet smell of the chopped eucalyptus, combined with the aroma of sticky toffee pudding and cherry flapjacks in the kitchen made the hard work worthwhile.
Michael explained that they source as much produce from the garden as possible, but obviously much is season-dependant. The summer menus are heavily influenced by what the gardeners grow, which includes a lot of lettuce, courgettes, aubergines, tomatoes, and chillis (usually used for the salt). The gardeners tell him what is coming into season the following week, and Michael starts to plan different recipes.
“The things you can make from a garden, if you have the space, which we have plenty of here, is phenomenal,” Michael said. “It’s amazing what we can actually grow.”
As well as keeping the on-site café and shop stocked, the kitchen also prepares frozen takeaway meals, which are popular with residents in the rental properties across the road.
I was shown a number of plants, including the sour Japanese orange Michael hopes to make into marmalade in the next few weeks when they ripen, and the banana plant, whose leaves he wraps around barbecued masala at weddings to give the dish extra sweetness. I also learnt that the palm trees in the Palm Garden were donated by Queen Victoria when too many were delivered for Osborne House, so are over 200 years old!
In a couple of weeks, the Sichuan pepper will be ready to harvest. These will be dried out and become the peppercorns used throughout the year in the pepper grinders. Sichuan has more of a spicy kick to it than normal black pepper.
The garden also sells a variety of Isle of Wight salts blended with their own flavours such as chilli, eucalypus bark and winter bark from two winter bark trees in the garden. The bark is dried out, mixed with salt in a 3:1 ratio and put in a spice grinder. You can only take a limited amount from the tree each year, otherwise, it could die, but one harvest per year can make 150 jars. The salt has a touch of spice, not as hot as the chilli salt they sell, but more of a cinnamon-y flavour. “If I run out before I can harvest it again, so be it,” Michael explained. “It’s a matter of sustainability, I don’t want to kill the tree just to make more salt, that would be pointless. As with anything, once it’s in season, I’ll take whatever I can and use as much as I can without harming the plants. As long as it’s here, I can always make more next year.”
Next, we visited the hop yard near the coastal entrance, where the key ingredients for the garden’s beer, lager and ale are grown. The hops are hand-picked over four days at the end of August and sent away to be kiln-dried. They come back vacuum-sealed and ready to go to Goddard’s Brewery.
The garden’s gin is brewed in Dorset, where their eucalyptus is infused into the gin.
I spent the rest of the day in the kitchen, learning about getting the prepared products ready for sale. First, Michael taught me how to seal jars of the new crab pear syrup. With a consistency somewhere between maple syrup and honey, it has a lot of flavour.
Using plastic bands soaked in alcohol, the trick was to get the seal in the right place on the lid so that it would shrink properly when heated in the oven. After sealing the jars, I cleaned them and started applying the labels. I also did this with the eucalyptus and honey cordial bottles and had a go at shrink-wrapping the plastic seals with a heat gun.
Starting the day in the garden and finishing in the kitchen packaging the products ready for sale really gave me an insight behind the scenes at Ventnor Botanic Garden. Before my visit, I didn’t realise the full variety of products available under their brand Hill Hassall Botanics, and how much they harvest, cook and sell from the garden itself.
Isle of Wight Observer