Peter Truman Photography

Wirksworth is not the first place you would think of when searching Derbyshire for garden delights. It's a small town just outside the Peak District National Park, close to several large limestone quarries and once the centre of the lead mining industry in Derbyshire (now long deserted). It's also an old town with narrow streets and alleyways (colloquially known as "ginnels") that criss-cross the hillside. Gardens and courtyards are often small and hidden well away from the main streets. You could easily have made a big mistake thinking that the gardens here are not worth looking at, but the Wirksworth and Gorsey Bank Open Courtyards and Gardens event held on Saturday and Sunday 11th and 12th July demonstrates.

Over the weekend 23 gardens were spruced up and opened to view, all proceeds going to two charities – Wirksworth Care Centre and Study Guatemala. Chatting to several of the garden owners suggested that the event was very well attended and they didn’t get a chance to read the weekend newspapers while waiting for visitors! But Wirksworth held a particular interest for us as we bought our first house there some 25 years ago, a tiny two-up two-down terraced cottage with no garden. We lived there for just over a year before moving a few miles away but have since not set foot to walk around the town. The town has certainly changed, the last two decades having seen a different demographic taking shape. Many of the old industries have either gone or drastically changed, people have left the town and others moved in, changing the way parts of the town look. I certainly do not recall so many BMW cars when we lived there.

This time we managed to see gardens we had never set foot in before and several gardens we had wanted to peer over the garden wall at when we used to live there. What a treat and a fascinating walk round the town. Of course, our “vision” is different now and we have a very different lens to look at things. What is important and interesting today quite probably had zero relevance when we were 25 years younger.

To the gardens then. Many Wirksworth gardens are tucked away behind houses and are not the gardens that surround your Edwardian detached house. Instead they are approached from the narrow ginnel between a terrace or row of houses. And where houses are not in a neat row, they are tucked into whatever spaces were available, so large gardens are very much the exception. But there are a few even in the most surprising places. Babington House, for example is up the steep Green Hill road that leads up from the town centre. It’s a beautiful building constructed in about 1630 as a lead merchant’s house and has served as a workhouse, cottage hospital and bed and breakfast. It has now returned to private hands and has a wonderful fishpond, formal gardens and vegetable patch.

More typical are the small, often tiny gardens that are just outside many houses. But no less impressive given their challenging locations. One of the many challenges faced is the number of snails and slugs – the stone walling that lines the paths and marks boundaries between gardens makes perfect places for these mollusks to breed and lie in wait for a drop of rain or less than sunny day. Then they seemingly attack in crowds, munching even the hardiest plants to a stump. Many gardeners in Wirksworth spend a lot of time collecting these pests up as an evening activity.

Other challenges have had to be overcome to work with the landscape. A garden in West End, for instance, needed significant work to change the path of the stream that finds its way out of the old mine workings. But this now makes a wonderful habitat for a growing collection of ferns. The car park that used to be The George on Coldwell Street had to have trenches dug, stones removed and soil brought in. This is now a delightful formal garden.