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A walled garden is a garden enclosed by high , especially when this is done for horticultural rather than security purposes, although originally all gardens may have been enclosed for protection from animal or human intruders. In temperate climates, especially colder areas, such as Scotland, the essential function of the walling of a garden is to shelter the garden from wind and frost, though it may also serve a decorative purpose. were very often walled, which segregated them socially, allowing the gardeners, who were usually expected to vanish from the "pleasure gardens" when the occupants of the house were likely to be about, to continue their work. The walls, which were sometimes heated, also carried fruit trees trained as .
Historically, and still in many parts of the world, nearly all urban houses with any private outside space have high walls for security, and any small garden was thus walled by default. The same was true of many rural houses and other buildings, for example religious ones. In palaces and most country houses, the whole plot, including even a very large garden, was also walled or at least fenced, sometimes with (much more expensive) metal railings along those parts of the boundary giving the best views to show off the splendour of the residence, as at the Palace of Versailles, Buckingham Palace and many others. In some cases there was originally a fence or hedging, but a wall was added later when funds allowed. In particular, hiring local labour to build a wall was considered a praiseworthy method of famine relief for the rich, and many walls round the grounds of country houses in the British Isles date to the famine years of the 1840s.
The horticultural, and also social, advantages of a walled garden meant that kitchen gardens often form or formed a walled compand within a larger walled compound. Sometimes this was for the security of the plants; in the 1630s the royal botanical garden of France (now the Jardin des plantes), itself walled all round, had an inner walled-off tulip garden, as the bulbs were valuable and prone to thefts.Hobhouse, Penelope, Plants in Garden History, 124-125, 2004, Pavilion Books,
Metaphor, "walled garden" may be used in many contexts (often pejoratively) to indicate a space, usually not a literal physical location, which is or is seen as closed to outsiders. One example is the closed platform in computing.
Most walls are constructed from masonry or brick, which absorb and retain solar heat and then slowly release it, raising the temperature against the wall, allowing , , and to be grown as against south-facing walls as far north as southeast Great Britain and southern Ireland.
The ability of a well-designed walled garden to create widely varying stable environments is illustrated by this description of the rock garden in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris' 5ème arrondissement, where over 2,000 species from a variety of climate zones ranging from mountainous to Mediterranean are grown within a few acres:
Susan Campbell, in a book devoted to walled kitchen gardens, mentions several factors which contribute to how productive a kitchen garden is. Productivity depended upon the suitability of the situation, and successful gardens depended on the availability of water, manure, heat, wall space, storage space, workrooms, and most importantly, a dedicated team of gardeners.Susan Campbell, Walled Kitchen Gardens. Oxford: Shire Publications, 2013 (1998), p. 5.
The walled kitchen garden at Croome Court, Worcestershire is reputedly the largest 18th-century walled kitchen garden in Europe. It is in private ownership and has been restored by the current owners. In about 1806, a high free-standing east–west hot wall was built, slightly off-centre, serviced by five furnaces; this is historically significant as it is one of the first such structures to be built.
The walled kitchen garden at Chilton Foliat, Wiltshire, was the subject of the 1987 television documentary series The Victorian Kitchen Garden.
Because of the walls, the community is unable to determine which actually occurred.
In John William Waterhouse's interpretation of the myth of Cupid and Psyche, Psyche lived in Cupid's walled garden.
Much of the storyline of Frances Hodgson Burnett's children's story The Secret Garden revolves around a walled garden which has been locked for ten years. The author was inspired by Great Maytham Hall in Kent.
"Rappaccini's Daughter", a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne, takes place almost entirely within the confines of a walled garden in which Beatrice, the lovely daughter of a mad scientist, lives alongside gorgeous but lethal flowers.Lesley Ginsberg, “The Birth-Mark,” “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” and the Ecogothic", - Dawn Keetley and Matthew Wynn Sivils. ed., Ecogothic in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Routledge, 2017, 114-133, p. 115.
In The Last Enchantment, the third book in Mary Stewart's novels of the Arthurian legend, Merlin constructs a heated wall for his garden at Applegarth.
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