A Tour of the Greatest Cornish Gardens by Simon Heptinstall

The wind had whipped my hair into a style reminiscent of a badly pruned apple tree. My mud-caked shoes had transformed into unwashed root vegetables and drizzle was running along my eyebrows and down to the end of my nose like an elaborate greenhouse irrigation system. And yet, against all expectations, I was having a wonderful time visiting the gardens of Cornwall in the midst of winter.

From Land’s End to the Tamar River, this county is known for its pasties, pixies… and spectacular gardens. But when the flowers die, do the crowds fade away too? “Gardens in winter!” I had protested when ordered off to Cornwall, “Are best viewed on a TV screen while sitting in a warm armchair.”

But a few hours into my tour I changed from a stressed office worker, worried about keeping my shoes clean, into a veritable David Bellamy… rummaging my fingers through wet evergreens muttering to myself “just look at this foliage!”

I was not alone in my unseasonal safari. At one garden I arrived early to find queues had been forming since just after dawn. People were arriving from all over Britain, from all over the world. Admittedly, it’s hardly another half-acre patch of petunias – this new garden has a unique appeal. It’s a garden for those who don’t even like gardens.

The Eden Project in Cornwall is easily the most popular garden in the UK. Eden boasts the world’s biggest conservatory – two spectacular domes containing a tropical rainforest and a Mediterranean garden. The multi-million pound project converted a gigantic disused china clay pit into what some are call ‘the eighth wonder of the world’ with 35-football pitches worth of amazing global horticulture. With scientifically formulated plastic heat-conserving panels, Eden is less like Alan Titchmarsh’s Gardeners’ World… more like Tomorrow’s World.

In fact it would be hard to imagine an attraction more different from the traditional English garden. Cornwall’s reputation as our garden capital has been built on classic gardens like Trebah – a watery riverside ravine full of exotic palms – and Trewithen – a stately display of camellias, rhododendrons and magnolias around a grand country house.

Gloriously traditional National Trust sites are dotted all over the peninsular – perfect ingredients for relaxed tours by car. Glendurgan is a lush garden on the banks of the Helford River with a historic cherry laurel maze, Trelissick’s dramatic rolling parkland overlooks the Fal estuary, and Trengwainton has a series of 180-year-old walled vegetable gardens.

The happy combination of more sunshine, warm waters of the Gulf Stream and sheltered picturesque slopes of the south coast have helped more than 80 gardens become tourist attractions in this one small county. My garden expedition may have ended in the futuristic “biomes” of Eden but it started in the past… at the Lost Gardens of Heligan.

This all-year garden near Mevagissey was the seat of the Tremayne family for more than 400 years but was neglected and forgotten from the start of this century. Ten years ago a team of enthusiasts stumbled on clues that there was something hidden in the acres of overgrown jungle. Since then the romantic restoration scheme scooped every award going – including Garden of the Year and Britain’s Best Outdoor Attraction.

In its way, Heligan was as revolutionary as the Eden Project when it opened 17 years ago. More than its banks of rhododendrons (including the biggest specimen in the world), its towering tree ferns (shipped from New Zealand in the last century) and its huge gunnera leaves (used as sunshades by Victorian gardeners), Heligan’s main attraction was its story.

The tale of how an exquisite Victorian garden was restored to its former glory using the original gardeners’ archives seemed to touch a popular chord.

Heligan is Britain’s number one garden, if you don’t count Eden, with more than 250,000 visitors a year. Heligan’s longest-serving gardener, Charles Fleming, was digging the huge vegetable garden in the rain when I waded past.

“When I started here this was covered in brambles,” he said, pausing to rest on his long-handled wooden fork. “You couldn’t even see anything. I’ve double dug (dug down two spade levels) the whole of it. Twice. Now I’m doing it again.” Characters like Charles make a visit to Heligan a memorable experience at any time of the year.

And the restoration has highlighted just how skilful but undervalued the lost generation of gardeners who created the original garden were. The original Head Gardener’s office has recently been opened to the public – it’s a little brick hut attached to a greenhouse. An open fire burns in the grate, the shelves are full of carefully-labelled jam jars full of seeds, an old wooden desk stacked with planting schedules and diagrams.

The gardeners still use it as an office but as a glimpse of the life of a plantsman of yesteryear it is a treasure.

Visitors can also see the humble apple loft where apprentice gardeners slept, the outside toilet with the signatures of the entire Victorian gardening team on the wall and the ingenious method the gardeners devised to heat greenhouses using horse manure.

Tragically, Heligan’s demise began after half the garden team failed to return from the Great War. Perhaps that’s why there’s a melancholy atmosphere in the lost valley woodland, the glasshouses of the productive gardens and the decorative ‘rooms’ of the Italian and New Zealand gardens.

At least there’s nothing melancholy about Charles. His weather-beaten face broke into a big toothless grin as he proudly showed me some beetroots from the vegetable garden. Perhaps he was demonstrating the secret of the whole garden’s success too. Heligan isn’t about the Lords and Ladies who enjoyed its splendour in the last century – it’s about those who did the work, and those who still do. Charles’ dedication and cheeky humour is a touching reminder of the private pride of those green-fingered workers of history.

When the Prince of Wales visited Heligan three years ago Charles spent the whole day following the Royal party, strategically weeding at a short distance, hoping to catch the Prince’s eye. Eventually the Prince turned to his namesake and asked: “How long have you been here?”

“Since 1850,” retorted Charles. Politely ignoring cheeky answer, the Prince continued: “And how are your blackcurrants?”

“No need to be personal, Sir,” replied Charles.

Cheeky but not disrespectful, Charles told me: “It was the most wonderful moment of my life.” And as if to prove the point, his wheelbarrow is still painted with the large letters HRH to commemorate his great day.

The light was failing as I left Heligan in the early evening. I glanced back down the tunnel of apple trees and saw Charles still digging his huge vegetable field in the rain. He raised his hand to wave goodbye… but only briefly, for he was immediately back at the task of digging the heavy wet mud for as long as he could still see.

The drive from the lush valleys above Mevagissey to the barren, windswept china clay hills behind St Austell is only a few miles – but Heligan and Eden are a million miles apart in concept.

The first glimpse of the domes came the following morning as I approached over the rim of the crater that was once Bodelva pit. I knew what to expect but still had a flutter of excitement as I glimpsed the two science fiction constructions down in the basin.

At first it’s difficult to realise how big the domes are – then you spot a Land Rover driving around the base, like a miniature toy car. They are spectacularly large – their hexagon honeycomb construction like a monstrous pair of insect eyes. It’s certainly a Meccano set for the 21st century.

The bigger dome is 55m tall and 240m wide, big enough to allow rainforest canopy trees like balsa and teak to grow to their full height and to allow a coffee plantation, banana patch and paddy field to grow side-by-side. Inside the sweltering hot dome there are steep paths leading through different geographical zones, zig-zagging between a 25m metre high waterfall and a sand-fringed lagoon.

Cornish gardens have long made visitors gasp at the palm trees and lush ferns that may not survive further east - but Eden trumps anything previously offered with rubber, cocoa, coconuts, pineapples, paw paw, breadfruit, mango, nutmeg, ginger and cinnamon growing as happily as in their native environments.

“Prepare to be ‘wowed’,” smiled Eden’s Media Director Paul Travers as we jumped into a four-wheel-drive vehicle to look inside the domes. Now, I am a professional travel writer who has seen many world sights. Even so, stepping into the interior of that biggest dome is sensational. The sheer bravery of the idea is stunning – and its execution is wondrous.

“This is why I gave up my house in Surrey and a job as Record Producer at Abbey Road Studios to move to Cornwall,” said Paul as I gawped speechlessly around the interior of the dome. “I took a salary a fifth of what I’d been earning but it was worth it to be involved with a project like this. I still think it’s amazing every time I step inside.”

The scale of the £80 million project is shown by just a few of the statistics: the clay pit was so sterile the Eden team had to create their own top soil - 85,000 tonnes of it - using another abandon clay pit as a giant mixing bowl. More than 80,000 plants have been grown from seeds, cutting or shipped in from plant collections around the world.

Eden has bought even more visitors to Cornwall and raised the profile of this garden county even further. The other 79 gardens needn’t worry though. They may be queuing for those stunning domes… but they’ll still be turning up at the stately homes too.

“That there Eden ‘tis a wonderful thing,” Charles had told me looking into the distance in from his rainswept vegetable patch at Heligan. “…but it won’t ever replace the real gardens like this….”