Some easily available almonds for a nuttery include these two which are hardier and more resistant to leaf curl – There are lots of things to see and to do here at Notgrove to keep both adults and children entertained including: If you’re planting more than a few nut trees, make a scaled plan on graph paper; consider planting in alternate rows, offset so that the pattern of trees is in triangles rather than squares, allowing rows to be closer, but also maintaining the distance between trees Almonds are pollinated by insects; hazel, walnut and sweet chestnut are wind pollinated. If you have a windy garden, and are growing the nuts together in a nuttery setting, then providing shelter such as a windbreak is important to ensure a good harvest.

Be sure to buy Prunus dulcis dulcis, the sweet almond, and not Prunus dulcis amara, the bitter almond. This latter is the one used for flavourings and is not one you’d want to eat from the tree! Window display at the House of the Tailor of Gloucester based on Beatrix Potter’s story. Photo: Rudi Winter/geograph.org.ukSet out your plan with canes — any undulation can throw a plan out. Views are important, so finesse by eye

Domestic nutteries were a regular feature from at least the sixteenth century, with cultivated varieties of hazel as well as the native species. Although they were a means of adding extra food to the table at a time when many households were largely self-sufficient, they could also be decorative. Hazel was the most commonly grown nut tree, but Sweet Chestnut and Walnut were also grown. Almonds were only grown in sheltered and more southerly gardens.They’d been brought in by the Romans but their cultivation has been a bit hit and miss in Britain. Beatrix was also a sheep breeder and conservationist, buying up large swathes of countryside on the proviso that the National Trust would buy half of it from her when the funds became available. Here was someone using their earned wealth for the greater good. She was into conservation long before the cause became trendy. Talking of the National Trust, it’s portfolio includes at least a dozen properties connected with writers, a bit of a who’s who of English Lit; one of them, of course, is Beatrix. The last of Beatrix’s little books, designed so that even the smallest of children could hold them, ‘The Tale of Little Pig Robinson’, was published in 1930. When Beatrix died three days before Christmas in 1943 aged 77 she left 4,000 acres of land and 14 farms to the National Trust.At nearly 800ft, Stow-on-the-Wold is the highest of the Cotswold towns and is famous as a centre for antiques. The Roman Fosse Way from Cirencester to Leicester passes through it and it probably dates from a prehistoric fortified settlement on top of the hill.

Sweet chestnut about to bear fruit. How to plant a nut tree: What you need to know before you begin Peach leaf curl is another problem, due to the close relationship, so be sure not to plant almonds and peaches near each other. Hazels are not self-pollinating, so you’ll need a compatible pollination partner for a nut harvest. If you envisage grazing or mowing between trees, nitrogen-fixing clovers — notably the long-lasting red and white clover — are excellent; they enrich the soil and attract beneficial insects. In a forest-garden approach, the planting is based on a natural woodland and tiered from trees through shrubs and herbaceous layers to ground cover; in an ornamental garden situation, the opportunity for planting species that thrive in semi-shade is considerable. Belle Epine’, ‘Bouche de Bétizac’, ‘Marigoule’, ‘Marlhac’. ‘Marigoule’ is the most reliable partially self-fertile variety

Everything else you need to know about how to grow a nut tree

Strictly speaking, the nut trees need to form a cohesive group to be classed as nuttery. As we’ve seen in examples above, this still gives scope. But, as we are discussing a garden situation, there’s no reason why we can’t be even more flexible. For example, you may not have space to plant three walnut trees together but you do have room by spreading them out. Add in a sweet chestnut to give you a shady seating area, a couple of almond trees near your olive and a row of hazel as boundary for the kitchen garden and I think we could safely say you have a decent sized nuttery in your garden.