The Lost Gardens of Heligan
“Putting Heligan in aspic for posterity wasn’t what we wanted. Instead, we’d tell the story of those who worked here and re-discover their horticultural knowledge and skills.”
Go here if: you’re looking to find magic in nature, lose yourself in awe, or take a moment to pause.
What is it: Sometimes when you expect a tourist destination, what you find is a place of true wonder. From the founder of The Eden Project (and now Gillyflower Golf Course) Sir Tim Smit, The Lost Gardens of Heligan comprises 200 acres for nature lovers to explore, with breathtaking twists and turns through a lost landscape and a lost history.
Why you’ll love it: Like a story from a fairytale, a door found in the ruins of the Heligan estate led to the discovery of a garden lain long dormant. When World War I reaped its devastation, it took many of the gardeners who had once worked the estate and eventually all that they had created here: the Victorian glasshouses broke, the ferns and camellias grew over, the plant specimens brought from around the world, became hidden by time. Now Heligan has become the site of the largest garden restoration project in Europe; since the 1990s a team has worked to restore what once was, adopting the same principles of regenerative architecture, reviving the plants and species forgotten and revealing the original gardens.
Take the trail past the living sculptures embedded in the landscape (including the much-photographed Giant’s Head and reclining Mud Lady) through the jungle hidden in a valley (you can cross it by a rope bridge and it all feels like a dinosaur might emerge at any moment) up to the pineapple pit and the working gardens. But most of all just wander – the landscape shifts as you do, and the discoveries reveal themselves, sometimes slowly.
Heligan is still actively farmed with over 300 species of mostly heritage fruits, vegetables, salad, and herb plants, that are then used in the Heligan Kitchen, and heritage breeds (it was lambing season when we visited).
What you need to know: We sought out The Thunderbox, which was not what we thought it would be – once the gardener’s lavatory — but it contains the secret of past lives. The gardeners wrote their signatures on the wall beneath the statement “Don’t come here to sleep or slumber.”: the date August, 1914. In 2013, the Imperial War Museum recognized The Thunderbox as a “Living Memorial” to the gardeners of Heligan, a testament to the people who worked on the estate before World War 1 took them.
How to bring this into your life: Beyond visiting, you can attend a Lost Supper.
In their own words: “We were fired by a magnificent obsession to bring these once glorious gardens back to life in every sense and to tell, for the first time, not tales of lords and ladies but of those “ordinary” people who had made these gardens great, before departing for the Great War.”
