Yorkshireman collects 4,000 old gardening tools, including one that'll take your legs off

Most were discarded generations ago, but a remarkable collection of more than 4,000, gathered from boot sales and auctions around the country, sheds new light on the lost art of growing produce in the grounds of the country houses of the three ridings.

Robert Addyman’s hoard dates back to the 1760s, an age in which even pineapples and bananas took root in coal-heated greenhouses within vast walled gardens.

“You had to grow your own food and if you didn’t grow it, you didn’t eat,” said Mr Addyman, who is demonstrating items from his collection in the manicured grounds of the late medieval Norton Conyers manor house, near Ripon, where his ancestors once took tea.

Pineapples were a particular status symbol for past generations, with the master of each house keen to get the first one of the season on his dinner table before his neighbour - until the reality of how much the fuel was costing kicked in.

“There would be a big furnace in the back of the greenhouse, which would be stoked 24 hours a day,” Mr Addyman said. “You could pick strawberries in December.

“The skill was keep the right temperatures in the glasshouses. If you didn’t, that was your crop gone.”

Kitchen gardens were common at large country homes and small rectories. The Duke of Portland’s Welbeck Estate, south-east of Sheffield, extended over 30 acres, with 30ft high walls, each heated with coal brought in from the duke’s own pits.

The kitchen gardener’s kit was as varied as it was vast. Hand-held implements included a fork for cultivating each crop - 6in tines on the strawberry fork and two prongs on the parsnip picker - and another for straightening cucumbers. Mr Addyman’s collection also includes a riveted, leather hosepipe and a 5ft hedge cutter that it took two men to operate.

For unwelcome visitors, there are mole traps, double-headed mouse traps, and worse.

“In the fruit season, poachers would come over the wall,” Mr Addyman said.