In 1886 the head gardener at Ashton Gifford, William Henry Line, was charged with unlawfully destroying plants in the walled garden, and fined five pounds on being found guilty by the Warminster police court. A newspaper article of the trial gives a sense of the productivity of the walled garden: "Unripe cucumbers had been cut, the onion bed had been knocked about, fruit had been knocked off the trees and the trees pulled from the wall, strawberry plants pulled up and chrysanthemum plants in pots destroyed."