A slice of New Zealand heaven in the UK

By PETER CALDER

To tell the truth, the sight was not unexpected since I had been following the map's directions since the moment I came within walking distance. But it was still an eerie feeling to come on a slice of New Zealand native bush in the middle of the Cornish Riviera.

Here a new totara glowed silver in the gloom cast by tree ferns. There the clusters of yellow-green starburst announced a cabbage tree (never mind that they call it a Torbay Cornish palm). In the lower growth, fuchsias winked. Grasses - silver-grey or straw-black - lined the rocky path edges.

High on a Cornish hillside, almost within sight of the sea, in a garden which was lost for 70 years, is a slice of heaven they call "New Zealand".

It's a spot that plainly holds a special place in the hearts of the people who made it: a 110-year-old photograph of it is the frontispiece to the enterprise's official history. That picture shows the head gardener, all done out in his Sunday best, waist-deep in a pool of silver-grey fern.

The Cornish weather seems to agree with our flora. In this patch are several kinds of kowhai, large forget-me-nots from the Chathams, rengarenga lily, clematis, oddly shaped pittosporums, muehlenbeckia and tree ferns which - I will learn - came as ballast on ships from Australia.

But there is more to appeal to the 400,000 visitors who tread the paths of Heligan each year than the patch of New Zealand which catches the eye of this gardening-averse antipodean.

The almost 200ha site showcases every conceivable kind of horticultural husbandry: precisely planted vegetable gardens and tonsured lawns; melon and fig houses and a pineapple pit; herbariums and hedges, shrubberies, rockeries and areas of woodland wild enough to earn the name "jungle".

Yet for most of this century, they were invisible, hidden under a carpet of creeping ivy and weed. That's why they are known as the Lost Gardens of Heligan.

It's an odd name, given that their recent history is a story not of loss but of discovery and hard work. What's more, they were never lost, but only lost to view, strangled and shrouded by decades of neglect.

But people in the area knew about Heligan. There have been gardens there since the late 16th century. The Tremaynes, whose ancestral seat is in the gardens' centre, created plots of produce and beauty.

As the years went by they developed an extraordinary garden displaying exotic plants and showcasing the revolutionary horticultural technologies of the Victorian era.

The man who uncovered them isn't far away, it turns out, in the nearby village of St Ewe, holding court at the Crown Inn, where he's the landlord. In between showing diners to their tables, John Nelson sips his pint with his weathered features creased in a permanent grin.

"It was just me and the dog for the first 18 months. I'd known this place was there for 40 years, but it wasn't until I started cutting into it that I began to realise how it was all still there, perfectly preserved and waiting to be uncovered."

The loss of the gardens is easily explained, he says: "Two world wars. All the gardeners went to war and the gardens were run down."

Helped by volunteers from a national conservation trust, Nelson and his dog cleared more than seven decades worth of growth in a year. They were grateful for the old gardeners' practice of spreading sea salt on the paths to keep the weeds down.

"We could peel the creepers back like a carpet," says Nelson, "and usually we would find paths and drains in perfect condition."

Heligan hosted 12,000 visitors in its first year and 40,000 the next. But word soon spread and a Channel 4 television documentary series caused an explosion of interest.

The popularity of garden lovers' tours of Britain has spawned a network of B&Bs in garden settings, which makes it possible to cover the whole country while staying with like-minded, green-fingered types.

We stayed in the Wagon House at Heligan, whose proprietor, Mally Francis, spends her days painting exquisite studies of plants whose detail recalls the botanical illustrations of Banks or Solander.

Certainly Heligan is a must-see stop on any such itinerary. But it's only a short drive to a newer, even more astounding achievement. The Eden Project, which opened in May last year, was the brainchild of Tim Smit who partnered John Nelson at Heligan. ("He did all the talking and I did all the work," says Nelson, without a trace of rancour.)

A giant disused china clay quarry near St Austell in Cornwall has been landscaped into what its creators are touting as the eighth wonder of the world.

The Eden Project is more than a garden, more even than a collection of giant greenhouses called biomes, which are the most striking sight when you arrive at the edge of the 15ha crater. It is described as "a theatre in which to tell the story of human dependence on plants".

The sheer numbers beggar belief: Smit, his credibility assured by the achievement at Heligan, raised almost $300 million from public and private sources to build it. They moved out 1.8 million tonnes of soil and moved in 100,000 tonnes of compost to make a new Eden in what was once a clay wasteland.

The centrepieces are the enormous geodesic domes, made of more than 360km of scaffolding covered with a space-age transparent foil. The resulting biomes contain two indoor environments, one tropical and one temperate. A third, uncovered one houses more than 4000 plants from all over the world.

The idea is that Eden should be a sort of living encyclopaedia of the plants people have used - whether for food, medicine, building or weaving - and a living institute designed to educate people about the relationship between the human and plant worlds.

It's a hugely impressive achievement, built in the face of great challenges - not least a two-month downpour in the early stages of construction which dumped more than 160 litres of water into the pit.

It's enough to make even this lifelong non-gardener understand why people get excited about plants.

* Peter Calder visited Britain with assistance from the British Tourist Authority.

Ph: (09) 303 1446

email: bta.nz@bta.org.uk


Cornwall Tourist Board

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Heligan

Bed and Breakfasts for Garden Lovers