SURVEYING the weed choked remains of a former Torfaen hospital’s walled garden, 87-year-old Peter Kelly had just one word to sum up the scene - “sacrilege.”

Born a couple of hundred metres away in a long since demolished tied cottage that came with his father’s job as head gardener at Llanfrechfa Grange, the latter’s walled garden was part of a childhood “playground” that included surrounding woodland, fields, and an orchard.

Mr Kelly returned to the site for an open day for people interested in a project intended to restore the walled garden as a feature of the grounds of Gwent’s proposed Specialist and Critical Care Centre (SCCC).

His visit triggered decades-old memories of a time when Llanfrechfa Grange - an Elizabethan-style manor house built in the mid-19th Century - was still a private house, long before it was adapted in the early 1950s for its recently relinquished role as a residential hospital for people with learning disabilities who required continuing healthcare.

Mr Kelly, who now lives in Bassaleg, read about the restoration project in the Argus, and has since provided invaluable historical and first hand information about the walled garden and the Grange site to project organisers.

“I’m broken-hearted to see it like this, because when I was growing up, it was a sight to behold,” said Mr Kelly.

His father John Thomas Kelly was head gardener at Llanfrechfa Grange from 1927-49, during which time the house fell out of private ownership, being turned in the mid-1930s into a training centre for young unemployed men, prior to a spell in the 1940s as a nursing home, with maternity services.

“I remember the garden full of fruit and vegetables, with big greenhouses. I’d climb up and walk around the walls, and could look down on all the different plants and trees,” said Mr Kelly.

“It was all based on crop rotation, and the garden was very important. It supported the Grange during the war because there was always food being produced.

“How it’s been allowed to get like this, it’s sacrilege. But it will be great if it can be tidied up and used again.”

Another with hands-on experience of the walled garden is Karl Earnshaw, head gardener at the Grange from 1980-97, when he was employed by the NHS and the site was home to hundreds of patients.

He said it was full of vegetables and some patients used the garden and helped out there.

“It’s a big job to restore it, but the soil underneath will be fine, when the surface is cleared,” he said.

The restoration project is being sponsored by Aneurin Bevan University Health Board, and the aim is to set up a formal community group to take over the garden’s development and maintenance.

For more information, e-mail WalledGarden.ABB@wales.nhs.uk or visit www.llanfrechfawalledgarden.wordpress.com