www.iht.com Heligan is the Rip van Winkle of gardens. Nurtured by successive generations of the Tremayne family for four centuries, it fell into disarray after almost all the workers who maintained it marched off to war in France in 1914. By the end of the 20th century, a jungle of ivy, bramble and laurel had engulfed flower beds and shrubs.
Far from the tourist track near St. Austell, Cornwall, in southwestern England, which is noted mainly for the towering white cones of waste from its kaolin (china clay) mines, Heligan was all but forgotten by the time Tim Smit happened along. Smit, now 50, was born in the Netherlands, studied archaeology in Britain, prospered in rock 'n' roll as a songwriter and promoter and then, in 1987, moved to Cornwall.
Three years later, a chance meeting led to his excited discovery and exploration, sometimes on hands and knees, of the overgrown acres.
He and a group of enthusiastic associates subsequently leased the property and launched a crusade to save what they christened, with an unerring instinct for public relations, "The Lost Gardens of Heligan."
Now, almost 15 years after they began hacking, digging and replanting, the 80-acre, or 32-hectare, garden flourishes anew on its plateau overlooking St. Austell Bay, a tranquil arm of the English Channel.
Despite a remote site and poor signs along twisting roads, it has grown into Europe's largest garden restoration, drawing 300,000 visitors in 2004.
Among Heligan's great glories is a collection of giant rhododendrons brought from the Himalayas by the renowned plant collector Sir Joseph Hooker between 1847 and 1849, one of which now has branches 86 feet, or 26 meters, long; an Italian garden inspired by the finds at Pompeii and Herculaneum; a secluded Sundial Garden with superb herbaceous borders, including a haze of purple verbena, in the style of the late 19th century, before Gertrude Jekyll revolutionized garden design; a valley filled with prehistoric-looking tree ferns and other exotics that thrive in Cornwall's generally frost-free climate; and rare specimen trees from far and wide, including one of the tallest black pines in the world.
But Heligan's truly distinctive features are its fruit and vegetable gardens, once again lovingly tended with the same combination of remarkable ingenuity and back-breaking labor that created them in the Victorian era. Long ago the produce helped to feed the Tremayne family and their houseguests, plus 20 house staff members and 22 gardeners; today it feeds the paying guests at the Willows restaurant in the visitor center, but also serves a broader social purpose.
"The gardens themselves may no longer be 'lost,"' Smit writes in the Heligan Handbook, "but our focus remains on reviving the 'lost' traditions which were associated with working them. Our chief interest is an exploration of man's relationship with the land, particularly the relationship between the land itself, the food we eat and the countryside which surrounds us. We are not here simply to provide a historical perspective but to look backwards and forwards at the same time: both backwards to where our gardens and food came from and forwards to those issues that confront us now."
At the heart of the operation stands the brick-walled vegetable garden, a trapezoid whose northeast corner stretches out to catch every last bit of warmth from the early evening sun. Divided by an apple arbor and footpaths into six plots, each with rows up to 36 meters long, the garden is dug (and manure is dug in) exclusively with hand tools. Parts are covered in winter with seaweed brought from the nearby village of Portmellon, which imparts iodine and other beneficial trace elements to the soil.
"This builds muscles, but it does your back in, too," said Sylvia Travers, a young Irish horticulture graduate who showed my wife, Betsey, and me around on our most recent visit. "We're not rigorously organic, but we use minimal chemicals, so I spend a lot of my time contending with slugs, squirrels and the various fruit flies."
In keeping with the Victorian ethos, rows are straight, plants are evenly spaced and everything is in its ordained place.
Heligan does not limit itself, of course, to common vegetables; it grows salsify and scorzonera and parsley root, cardoons and borecole and sea kale, all highly valued a century ago but now largely ignored.
Nor does it focus on long-lasting if often tasteless supermarket varieties; in an effort to preserve diversity the gardeners grow heirloom gems - six kinds of broad beans, five kinds of peas, a dozen kinds of cabbage and brussels sprouts and no fewer than 27 kinds of potatoes, including yellow-fleshed rattes, beloved by French epicures but hard to find, at least through commercial channels, in Britain or the United States. There are red, black, purple, blue, brown and white spuds, still only a fraction of the 1,500-odd varieties seen at London shows in the 1870s.
Special corners are reserved for princely species like the purple-tinged artichokes, relatives of thistles, and asparagus, with its feathery foliage climbing high above elevated beds. Rhubarb is grown under ancient terra-cotta bell jars, scarlet runner beans climb bamboo tepees and pears and plums are espaliered against the old walls.
In spring and early summer, the garden seethes with color - not only the florid gladioli, snapdragons and other flowers raised for cutting but also the more delicate blossoms of the gooseberries, currants and raspberries growing in cages off to one side, and a sizzling array of chards, with wrinkled, prominently veined red or green leaves and stems of orange, yellow, red, peach and pink. More hues of green than the most avid gardener has ever seen provide a subtle and ever-changing background.
But some of the most dramatic achievements at Heligan take place out of sight, notably the culture of pineapples - yes, pineapples, real Jamaica queens and smooth cayennes - far from their natural habitat. They are grown in pits heated by decaying horse manure, laboriously shoveled by hand, 30 tons several times each season. The first to be produced in the reborn garden were presented to Queen Elizabeth II.
To their credit, Smit & Co. not only delight in their accomplishment but also ask themselves whether such a trick is worth the time and money in an era when so much seems to depend on encouraging the consumption of seasonal, locally raised produce rather than satisfying unreasonable expectations. Pineapples and asparagus in midwinter: possible, of course, but desirable?
Other specialized structures produce melons and bananas, just as they once did for the dining pleasure of the squire, and presumably to bowl over his guests.
The Flower Garden, another trapezoidal plot, surrounded by walls built in 1780, is filled with the vividly colored annuals, now considered somewhat passé by some, that the Victorians loved to view in situ and to cut for display inside their houses. In July and August, when the herbaceous borders fade, the dainty sweet peas form fragrant walls, and the tidy rows of annuals sway in the breeze, vividly colored and intoxicatingly sweet-smelling - old friends like larkspur, asters, cornflowers and cosmos.
Specialized period greenhouses line two of the four walls of this garden, devoted to the cultivation of grapes, physalis, citrus and peaches. Travers ducked into the Peach House, which is off-limits to visitors, emerged with a couple of ripe, ruddy specimens and urged us to try one. I happily complied. When I had devoured the delectable fruit, and my face was smeared with sweet, sticky juice, I reflected that if the lives of those old Cornish gardeners were clearly hard ones, those of the Tremayne grandees must have been a frolic.
THE GARDENS The Lost Gardens of Heligan, Pentewan, St. Austell, Cornwall, (44-1726) 845-100; www.heligan.com. Open daily 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; to 5 p.m. in winter. Adult admission £7.50, or about $13.90. A tearoom and restaurant offer a modest seasonal menu using produce from the gardens and local farms.
LODGING AND DINING The hotel prices below are for doubles and include breakfast and VAT.
Hotel Tresanton, St. Mawes (44-1326) 270-055, www.tresanton.com, has been turned from a yacht club into a chic, modern seaside resort by Olga Polizzi. The food is well above average - try the delectable grilled local lobster with garlic butter - the rooms are quietly lush, and you can rent its 48-foot sailing yacht, built for the World Cup in 1938. Rates begin at $425.
The comfortable Driftwood, (44-1872) 580-644, www.driftwoodhotel.co.uk, close by in Rosevine near Portscatho, offers panoramic views from its cliff-top perch high above the sea. Most people consider the food there even better than at Tresanton's. Rates: from $328.
In addition to the hotels, you might try the Trengilly Wartha Inn, (44-1326) 340-332, www.trengilly.co.uk, which is lost in the lanes near Constantine outside Falmouth - 45 minutes or so west of Heligan but close to other top gardens like Trebah and Glendurgan. It's worth the drive for the scrumptious local oysters, but be sure to call for precise directions or you'll get lost. |