The Lost Gardens Of Heligan (Channel 4 Documentaries) (VCI & Channel 4 Video) (VHS 1999)

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] at the lost gardens of Heligan the biggest garden restoration this century in Europe is underway but actually wasn't that tree we wanted very good but [Music] 100 years ago these were amongst the most beautiful gardens in Cornwall then the First World War put an end to a way of life unchanged for centuries of the 22 gardens staff that works at Heligan over half perished in the fields of Flanders [Music] it was the end of an era for Halligan and a pattern that was to be repeated in Country Estates all over Britain with the death of the gardeners many of the craft skills that kept the gardens alive died to the tremaine family had owned this land for over 350 years lost heart in their gardens and left gradually Heligan fell quietly to sleep until 1990 when John Willis inherited the land from his grandfather at remain my reaction go round it was amazement and excitement I mean there was this wonderful place all desperately ever-growing it had the feeling that no one had been into it for donkey's years and to a large degree that was true it was my first opportunity to explore it and the reaction was this is wonderful we must do something with it the problem was what while you're still trying to work out what exactly to do I more or less by Charles met Kim and before I had to tackle the question of exactly how to do it it gelled itself when we walk around and ideas grew from there Tim Schmitt had recently moved to Cornwall leaving behind his career as a music producer in London Heligan offered him the opportunity of a lifetime and the chance to return to his earlier love archaeology yeah that's great imagine no 150 years what am i after the first impressions have been hideously overgrown it was a wonderful day that will will live with me forever and I think you genuinely had a feeling of discovery that you you you you cut through the brambles and the laurel and just at the point that you were flagging each time you'd come across a structure that that caught your imagination and but every softening had these amazing bursts of color were one of these these these rhododendrons had burst into flowers it was very exciting I need to go back to my childhood you noticed with the date of May reading The Secret Garden Peter Rabbit I suppose and that feeling is actually what inspired me to fall in love with it I'm sure it wasn't to do with horticulture anything like that it was to do with the feeling of finding secret places that have stories that you know maybe you never know but you could let your fantasy run riot with it [Music] to me the most powerful moment was finding the doorway and then seeing a of light through it and then poking through could see there that there brambles completely covering everything I think the most startling thing was in fact as you looked through you saw the the finial top of the old orchid house which was completely gutted and covered in bambbles and that somehow captured that sense of sadness of that period gone a little bit boldly sticking through shortly afterwards John Willis made the decision to lease the land to Tim and John Nelson John was to become the other half of an enduring partnership a local builder he had the practical skills to make the dream a reality the house was not included in the lease in the 1970s it was converted into flats and sold off what they did take on was a wilderness that most sane people would have found daunting I think the reason it really worked between me and Tim was because was rather strange that some we both entirely different fields but that's probably the reason it did work was the fact that I was someone that could get out and do it and Kim made sure I had what I needed to do it with which I think you couldn't have done more one without the other it was a very important between the two of us once we decided we were going to do it John and I asked several contractors to come and quote to do the clearance remember that they all came and they were so frightened of it that they wouldn't quote because they thought that if they made a quote which was written and they couldn't follow it up as we make them go bust so John said to me you said victim why don't we clear one acre measure it out and do one acre didn't we and then we'd have some idea into the scaling it out how long it would take and and I know it sounds like a joke but we started and just never stopped I think that it was was it was the way we started literally more or less on my own and I'd learnt the hard way once I'd done that and helped him along pretty did make it ten times easier we had a lot of good friends helped us know that really well I I think that was brilliant because they really were the the what we were looking for that that big Yvonne I remember I was looking a dialer Dana June the 5th 1991 I think that was the most exciting day we ever had here which was we cleared a hundred metres of road in one day one day with a dumper truck at one end we have a whole whole team you know cutting down the edges of the path rolling it up like a carpet then cutting it again bugging it in the dumper keeping going keeping going keeping going I was it amazing to think that you know 7:00 a.m. in the morning he was completely overgrown and by 7:00 p.m. that night you could actually get back the feeling of a view along Vista underneath all those rhododendrons now is as good as great wasn't it yeah the skill of the former gardeners soon became clear I find it extraordinary there isn't a single example in the whole path network of a tree growing through the main art path and we do know from the writings of the head gardener at the turn of the century that every autumn it was part of the job of the gardeners to sprinkle cease and from pen to and onto the paths just enough so that it would keep the weeds down so that undoubted he's had a big impact on not allowing any root penetration because he got build up over years and years and years in its heyday Heligan was a thousand acre Cornish estate that stretched down to the fishing village of member gissy the gardens were surrounded by home farms and woodland making the estate self-sufficient the pride and joy of the Tremaine family were there 57 acres of designed gardens created by four successive generations from the 1750s to the early 1900s [Music] on the northern side of the house are the oldest gardens 35 acres of pleasure grounds that date back to the mid 18th century in the middle are the productive gardens which supplied the food all year round to the inhabitants of the big house beyond the lawn is the jungle a 22-acre Victorian creation offering a taste of the rainforest where subtropical plants thrive in its sheltered Valley location restoring the gardens created a dilemma if a landscape has evolved over many years to which period should it correctly be restored the Lost Valley presents a unique challenge 30 acres of ornamental woodland originally planted over 250 years ago now for us the great challenge when we discovered Heligan was to ascribe particular features to a particular period it was very very difficult those plates of time that really make having an exciting because you never know what's around the next corner morning Charles one of the biggest surprises was John's discovery of the ravine the ultimate in Victorian artifice the fashion of the day was to recreate wild settings to provide a dramatic backdrop for the rare specimens being brought back by the plant hunters there was a bad couple of patches further down the ravine like a giant mound which was always curious about we hadn't really done nothing about find out what it was and then one day my dog went through walk disappeared and she was well trained she'd always come back every time I called her this time she didn't she just kept on barking so wandering across I rummaged around I could still hear her but couldn't see her and then ended up with her in the pond down there I'd fallen right through what has happened there trees had fallen across the brambles had gone straight across on top and Ivy and everything else and appeared at nearly 70 years of fallen leaves had formed a roof right the way across the whole ravine and then we started clearing and became across some rather strange sites we found the waterfall and we gradually worked her way up these little pole to a pyramid rock up there and found a pipe sticking out and then we started finding strange earth stopcocks it meant that we'd actually found in the ravine the whole water system for Heligan the chance finding of the ravine led to the biggest underground discovery at Halligan the RAM pumps a complex water system crucial for maintaining the estate fade from one of the half miles down the valley pumped up by what they call hydraulic rams wonderful structure in itself and then gravity fed and right the way down through the gardens and to the big house so they had a marvelous water supply last summer boolean hot summer every gardening corn was very concerned no water we were lucky we'd gone to the trouble of restoring the rounds so again countless amount and that's why Helen is looking so beautiful today we would have lost a lot of trees without me [Music] the combination of moisture and dappled sunlight in the ravine provided near perfect habitat for wild primroses in the spring and a vast collection of rare tree ferns but this is a far cry from the original intention here we are in about 1880 1890 and we're looking at what we now call the ravine the so called Himalayan mountain pass which was designed in its earliest days as a rock garden an Alpine garden I have to say that the plantings don't look as if they were particularly pretty it was quite an ambitious project nonetheless because we worked out that over 2,000 tons of stone been brought into this ravine and this of course is a classic area for us to consider in when we come to the restoration of it do you leave it as you as you find it in the photographs or do you leave it as it has become and we took the view having searched our hearts in terms of restoration ethos that we wanted it to become what it had become not what it was because by accident the great ash trees that had grown through this rockery had created the perfect environment for english ferns and spring flowers so we decided to if you'd like enhance order to become and get rid of the Alpine garden it's a very charming place the regeneration of these gardens has captured the imagination of its paying public halligan is now the most visited private garden in Britain come on you like the cheap seats you're not here to enjoy yourselves well hello and welcome to the lost gardens of Heligan I haven't met all of you my name is Tim Smith I'm the project director and what I'd like to do is take this opportunity to give you something lowdown about how well the whole ethos of what we're about is to tell the story of those ordinary men and women who made these places great and to do that you can't do it as if you wanted to do history and aspect this isn't an exercise in nostalgia what we want to do is to make it live we want to actually grow the plants that were grown here we want to grow them in the manner in which they were grown here we want to taste them we want to eat the stuff we want to get a real feel for what it was like I think that's what people like when they come here because they get a feeling as if they're going back in time but not in one of those theme park you sort of ways they're actually seeing the good that was going on then being reproduced the very strange thing that anybody who's ever been to Heligan will tell you especially in the early days is that it really felt as if solid said last one out turn the lights out the atmosphere was as if something had happened everybody gone away and no one ever returned and that was it sounds odd for a grown man to say it but I don't like being a pelican at night not when the Sun has gone down everybody will tell you about the sound of footsteps they hear and the silence is so thick you can cut it with a knife it's extraordinary it's like a there are some silences which are calm and quiet like a going to rest this is a silent it's almost seething I can't explain it I can't explain I'm not sensitive enough but put my fingers on what it is but it's as if there's something walking around here not evil just sad very sad [Music] these four acres of kitchen gardens are the engine rooms of this Cornish estate at the turn of the century they supplied the Tremaine family and their staff with all the food to crucial to their survival now they are the only fully restored working walled gardens in Britain the flower garden vie flowers for cutting salad vegetables and produced exotic fruits in its range of glass houses the vegetable garden provided basic foodstuffs all year round the most labor-intensive area of the Heligan estate 18 of the 22 gardeners worked here today there's a staff of just six between these two Gardens is the melon yard with its cold frames and vines in Victorian times the head gardener would have been in charge of all this it was one of the most prestigious positions a working-class man could aspire to Phillip McMillan brows is today's equivalent he has to fathom out the methods his predecessors used to grow their food such as how they produce pineapples thousands of miles north of the Equator without glasshouse eating that's not bad we've got a tin now in 20 minutes and we only had about one and in 12 minutes cinnamon and put four in a row and give them wider spacing so we had aisles yes in the finest traditions of the head gardener Philip has no intention of getting his hands dirty his right-hand man is Tom peppery who in the role of Foreman carries out his instructions the complexities of what a head gardener would had to face with the actual guy who had to get in and do it I mean there is a limit to whether you could physically get in there or not so the guy who's gonna run it he's gonna put it to the spacing that he can get away with hit the head gardener he's gonna say shove him up so there forever probably bite behind one another's backs compromising all the time I think that's going to be the answer bringing these Gardens back to life is not just an exercise in nostalgia the aim of the team is to mirror precisely the methods of the generations of Heligan gardeners before them when you think of how fast this operation has developed in the whole gardens we are achieving things that really are quite a phenomenal rate and learning very fast our learning curve of everybody who works in the gardener's whoever the gardener's are their learning curves have been enormous ly steep because doesn't matter how much you think you know about gardening we knew nothing about Victorian gardening we had to put ourselves in the position of being Victorian when we first came into the Mellon yard you just saw these and thought they were friends nobody had any idea that they particularly were pineapple pits at the time and they were totally derelict but the most impressive thing I remember is that about two-thirds of the way down here in the manure pit on that side was an ash tree and one of the major efforts of roadless restoration was not rebuilding the frame he's actually getting and getting this huge ash bowl out in the first instance and I look back on that and think that that sort of thing was the major achievement of the restoration building it up and putting it right afterwards his chicken being compared with some of the original recovery the old Halligan gardeners were horticultural pioneers some of the pineapples they grew in this pit weighed as much as 18 pounds with no heating other than stable manure it was little shorter than the Racal this is probably the oldest method of growing pineapples that would have been used and I suspect that this is the only pineapple pit heated in this way that's extant in Great Britain at the moment we're heating it with the with the hot beds which go through this divided wall this hollow wall heat goes in at the bottom rises and then comes into the frame through the pigeon holes at the front in the old days they used stable manure because it's got a lot of urine and it's got a lot of nitrogen in it so consequently it'll fire up that is it'll start to heat up and ferment very quickly you wanted to give a consistent heat for as long as possible it's a bitterly cold winter but the vegetable garden as in the days of the tremaine's has produced enough greens to feed an army it's helped by the addition of a natural ingredient from the local beach just like the Victorian Foreman Tom Petric works alongside the garden staff well this is port melon beach where we come regularly to collect seaweed and it's good conditions really because there's a half a southerly Gale blowing and that blows right in here and brings the seaweed well not bother the beach as I'd like it but still there is plenty seaweed around and we should be able to fill our tractor and trailer getting back to the gardens by lunchtime we use it for a number of things mulching for making compost very labor-intensive takes a long time but the benefits are there it's adding organic matter medium which is ideal for plant growth direct garden had to extend the season in order to please the house and of course it was great it was a great benefit to the house to be able to you know bring things into the dining room that his guests might not see if they lived in another part of the country especially in the north of him [Music] so these are c-cal bed and we're playing around the nature here a bit was trying to force them not out of season but we're trying to wake them up and their winter dormancy so they give us an early spring crop by putting the lids over and the pots we're getting we will we hope to get nice Blanche's by cutting out the light and these will be a much sweeter than they would if they're a normal green color they're from the Brassica family and they're tough leathery Oh leaves not particularly flavor Sun but when they're when they're white and blanch they're very sweet what this does mean is that they they lose quite a lot of their vitamins because they have no chlorophyll in them so they're lacking in and I think it's a and C but they are very sweet and they're a typical Victorian crop they're not seen much these days and we hope to get something by the early spring when the soil temperatures warm it with the help of this insulation from the straw so with the Buddha light we'll get something fairly good [Music] it's now time to see whether we've got me whether it's nice and wage because it should be that's just how it should be very pale creamy color not much leaf you see it's it's going up towards the light hasn't put on any leaf breath at all because it you can't see the light so it stays white and this is the bit you eat don't tend to eat that bill they can that's the bit you eat and it's steamed or boiled lightly and it's quite sweet very tender and well worth all this trouble if you do have these forcing pots and OH bucket will do I mean you can use anything as long as you as long as you keep the light out just letting the crack so it can just grab it that's that's the seeker that's just how we wanted it to end up that's perfect I suppose we're growing 180 varieties of vegetables vegetables from seed these are the seeds of the vegetables and flowers that we use in the garden currently the complete collection more or less of all the seeds that we're going to use during the course of the year there were no historical archive concerning what was growing at Heligan at all so it comes back to the situation that we've had to adopt or I've had to hooked up all the time is to put myself in the position of being in the head gardener and saying okay what would I have grown so I've done that what's happened is that I probably found more varieties than I expected to which probably means that we grow a greater range of varieties than the head gardener might have done so in 1900 well there's that second early potatoes which we would like to have got in a couple of weeks ago the curb but the weather hasn't been favorable so it's a bit behind at the end of the world although what are we now almost end of March it's it's not late for these but we would like to have got them in earlier these are all the varieties of first early in secondary potatoes and salad potatoes that we've still got to put in how quickly they're going to to sprout I'm not sure all these potatoes been cheated that is that they've been stood on their hands and stood in the front room for a while two or three months in order to produce shoots and the varieties that were growing we've got of these earliest first early days and salads something of the order of 15 or 16 varieties all of which are period-correct that is pre-1910 and they're those sort of varieties that Victorian Edwardian head gardener for the use who I'd never seen this before there's a variety called solid red and a variety called solid blue you can see how blue the shoots are and in fact you can just about see how dark the skin is even if you can't see what's blue but what's interesting about it is that when you cut it look at that bluey purple flesh and the other ones got his solid red doesn't look too happy on the end there does it but you can see the color rotational sequence in here which we have over a couple of years more or less worked out a standard cropping program for the vegetable now we know what's going where what spacing is going out and basically what varieties we use the head gardener would have made the decisions about the balance of what was going to be grown and what was going to grow where because it was his responsibility to keep the kitchens going in the house and the foreman was the one who actually implemented things on the ground in general however I am sure that in those days like it would be today that there would have been a certain amount of discussion between the foreman and the head gardener about what was practical to do one of the other things that were very keen on and tended to be laughing about in the early stages when we started this garden was the regimentation an exacta tube with which we plant things out that was how the Victorians did it when the plants came up you expected them to stand there like little rows of Guardsmen and salute and not be at an angle or one row closer than another and now it's second nature to everybody that they understand that if the rows say 18 inches apart rows are 18 inches apart if they have to be thinned to 6 inches apart they are fender six inches apart that's what we mean by day to day implementation I think that we I'm spinning parsnip see ya I'm thinning them to about three inches those will grow on and then in a few months time will actually thin them till about six inches they'll actually grow at that there is more mind-numbingly boring jobs in this garden but this isn't a bad job actually there's far worse jobs on this so obviously but I don't say that it's a really brilliant job other words I'll be doing it all the time it would be boring you didn't have means of preserving food as we do these days their food that dries and stores well was an important part of the winter diet and peas and beans which tubers therefore were very versatile crops you see the thing is that these days that the the different types of P and B have improved so much I mean you know what packet of birds eyed peas takes out they're really good on a sweet small very juicy poppy Oh olden time peas a great big bullets taste nothing at all I think it's the same with a lot of the broad beans too we've we've we picked ones that we feel illustrate the the successional cropping an awesome stone crop and an early season crop and a late-season problem what I would like is to be sure that the rotational sequence that I've tried to establish a plan really is working properly last year was the first year of its operation it's very easy to run before you can walk if you're not careful and keep on having New Horizons new ambitions of where you're going to move on to but horticulture every so often you you just have to stand back and say let's get everything sorted to make sure we haven't left any missed out on anything it's important to do it otherwise the thing doesn't work then that takes time that takes a whole year of sequences seasonal sequences the flower garden Booth's waves of cut flowers to decorate the big house and produced exotic fruits in its range of glass houses restored only two years ago this 19th century garden is unique in Britain this is a Paxton house named for Sir Joseph Paxton of course have built the Crystal Palace he had this bright idea in the 1840s that the average household of the middle-class house owner should have their own Glass Houses so he produced the first kit off-the-shelf glass house the glass which was made on a on a barrel process was very narrow so the lots of glazing bars what you didn't want was the water running down the glass alongside the glazing bars simply because they did cause it to rock more quickly so that it was cut on this curved fashion so on the slope the water runs down the glass keeping away from the wood that's preserving it very simple piece of kit you could build it as a lean-to like this one or you could build it too from either side making a ridge house it was the very first kit off the shelf glass house that anybody could buy and perhaps surprisingly or perhaps not surprisingly because it was sort of ephemera very very few of these things survived that nearly all disappeared amongst the thousands that were probably sold and maybe this is the only actual working one left in the country restored and working the glass houses were strategically placed on a southwest aspect and the beds intentionally sloped to maximize the warmth of the early morning Sun it makes an ideal place to grow exotic fruits a diligently arranged supply of salad vegetables and crop after crop of flowers a late spring frost killed off one of their peonies so tom is improvising helping him is Jillian Cartwright who's responsible for cultivating the flowers let's go look great the bender when we're putting up our teepee for sweet peas we've got most of sweet peas up you can see them in that row of pistes and that's in the cut flower bed but we lost a peony out of the peony row here and so we've got to fill up with a nice little triangle to fill with sweet peas this is all we've got Tom mm-hmm those are the cute panties originals how many should see choosing to this just to yeah actually we better pinch out the weaker shoots cheers - maybe probably about 400 WI ladies coming today the flowers grown in here would have run into the house on request almost entirely and year-round as well so early early spring bulbs through all through summer we're going to try and get three crops in to see if we can depending on on the weather [Music] we've got a piece of ground which is effectively divided into half by the east-west path on the north side of it we've planted the early crop where exactly mirroring it on the other side now with our main crop sowing the whole thing just runs through in a straight line and that was part of the sort of Victorian system it was all done with precision we're going to show these annual cut flowers Gillian start here inside the clio meas with the clock is yeah and the GU dishes this soil has been partially knocked down so all I want you to do please is to rake it out get it good and level it's already beginning to dry which I'm quite surprised about coming down nicely the difference between the varieties that would have been grown a hundred years ago and the ones that you might have grown today commercially are simply a question of size how tall they are and these old varieties are much much taller and in many ways I think prettier and that much more enjoyable for it they're aesthetically to me more pleasing whether there any lessons to be learned for the way the Victorians did it in today's conditions is difficult to say except that by demonstrating what we're doing now may bring back to people the ideas of how you could extend the season and the variety that you could achieve as a result of that as if you're growing cut flowers at home it would be possible to have a succession of different sorts of flowers if you only had the one season when they were flowering let's say in late June in July and then they were finished you wouldn't be very popular in the house because probably people would be coming down here in all this September so you'd need to have the flower so you've got to have this succession of cropping so perhaps we could learn we could think back to those sort of things today realize what we've forgotten [Music] back in the vegetable gardens the salad red and solid blue potatoes are nearly ready for harvesting Tom and Mike and under gardener are assessing if they need to be sprayed with Bordeaux mixture a chemical at combats potato blight snowdrop and salad red that could result done it and the rest of the last three our salads yeah yeah yeah so Lord Rosebery yeah King Edward yeah and adds little blue he's all coming out this week yes no point of doing there mister mate might you want to start on the end start on these salads and well yeah yeah so the N three can yes we've got to do this this week me yes we're practicing systems that were used in late Victorian earlier Wardian times I would prefer to use organic systems but there are some crops which might not do as well as normal if they didn't have non organic treatments I mean Bordeaux mixture to treat blight on potatoes for example is allowed under organic principles but I would prefer not to use it oh dear now yeah when you get high temperatures and high humidity you get conditions perfect for the spread of light say you must spray Bordeaux mixture which is a preventative measure and so we have to do it once a fortnight well this is a damping down process that we have to do a lot through the summer months especially with these cucumbers keep the bed nice and wet it keeps down the red spider mite which is a big problem in glass house crops especially on these which have huge leaves and might spread fast I like hot dry conditions so if we can get the place nice and damp the floor as well in the walls then it helps to keep them down Victorians would have would have kept this glass our soaking wet all the time damped it down they had any amount of labour young boys to come in and do this sort of thing seven days a week [Music] [Music] [Music] we've had we had a dry winter very very cold we lost a lot of stuff we then moved on into an extremely dry spring and now we're getting a sort of wettest well wet ish midsummer with them with poor light levels which means that you know the difficult growing season continues so you know we're rained off today and when you're doing these because I know I'm not disappointed it's difficult it's that's half the fun of gardening you're trying to combat all these combat alleys and you say that won't come back come and euthanize it you know anyway so they were trying to we're trying to get over it August and the moment of truth they're looking for the elusive flower but it's all been somewhat of a bit of a disaster but it's recovering nicely for they have picked up well this poem that we've heard poor summer we really just well not exactly failed but we didn't do the best we can well we lost a good view because of the condensation dripping down into the center of the plant and the cold getting it on top of that we lost a lot we'll probably have to redo our hotbeds three times this winter instead of twice hell of a lot of labor to have to dig all these out and manure them with hot material but if we're really going to keep the temperature up in this pit during the winter it's the only way we're going to do it but I suspect this is a full-time job for a couple of people almost solely doing nothing else and that of course we find difficult to fit into our schedule it's interesting I mean how we've struggled to get where we have and learnt all we have along the way and to think that these chaps were producing pineapples that varied between 12 and 18 pounds each and the care and attention that must have gone into maintaining the temperature maintaining their growth feeding them watering them there must have been people looking after almost continuously it's not all been failures the end of the summer and the gardens are bursting with produce true to the Victorian tradition of extending the season the 16 varieties of potatoes sown back in March are still being lifted the solid red and salad blue were the last in line [Music] as soon as one crop comes out another goes in this time it's winter cabbage protected by a seaweed mulch which also acts as a repellent to the cabbage root fly in 1995 we had our first full year of using the whole product to garden and that then set us on the road of thinking about what we would do with this produce it's the intention that the crops would be harvested as and when they were ready in other words as and when the big house would have taken tonight it's the grand feast this time for the Heligan staff just as in the days of the tremaine's tom has to discuss menus with the cook morning tom I'm well thank you are you one piece menu all right good I'm plenty of onions and celery yeah yeah plenty of that scent your French beans and spinach how much means you got losing all different colors we've got purples light yellows greens all sorts so we bring a mix of those smashing yeah spinach and chard here we got lots of both of those okay and fresh fruits off RIT yeah we got all the currents yeah we've got gooseberries yeah red white colors raspberries so that's okay what about the potatoes yes please yeah don't eat potatoes yeah I'm going to try and get you this as blue and red yep so we'll get that up too as soon as we can smash it okay okay [Music] for Gillian it's her private moment of glory the flowers that she sewed back in June are ready for harvest [Music] in Victorian times these would have taken pride of place on the tremaine's top table nearly 100 years later it's as if time has Stood Still [Music] nowadays running the garden in a Victorian tradition is only in terms of the plants and the methods we use the there is no similarity within the way the Labour is used for the way the Labour is organized in a Victorian garden there was a very definite hierarchy head gardener through Foreman right down to garden boy it had its own levels of knowledge which were not passed down to levels below you it's all part of them mark and magic myth syndrome which gave you your position and people work long hours opportunities were small wages weren't high nowadays wages still anti but people work many hours less the position of women in society generally is also reflected in horticulture has been an opportunity for women to go to be to the senior levels so there's little or no comparison between the people who are working in the garden today and those who worked here in the olden days having said that what we're doing is still a homage to that tradition [Music] this project is gonna go on at the level that it has been a level of success expand in the short space of time it needs a lot of enthusiasm and hard work and dedication the idea is to get this garden into a situation whereby anyone can take it over and carry on the good work that we started so I would think that the next three or four years would be a time of great importance to make it into a place that people continue to want to come to that wasn't [Music] a hundred years ago a reviewer wrote in the gardener's Chronicle any visit to Heligan would be quite incomplete without mentioning mrs. tremaine's sundial garden this is a very charming enclosure of about a quarter of an acre filled with all kinds of old-fashioned flowers which produce a gay succession from January through to December he described it as the finest herbaceous border in the country today its glorious past is only a memory derelict after decades of neglect first job that speech trees coming down when that's on the ground who's gonna be cut up in the dumper and across to the fire because we can so bring limb start slashing all this lot down once we get that flat I should bring the digger in and we scrape right over the whole site right we get on then shall we [Music] Anabelle walton just 27 years old has the prestigious job of heading the gardening team as head gardener of the pleasure grounds this garden is going to be my responsibility to plan and layout and look after in the future so at the moment I'm just trying to make sure everyone knows what they're doing and we're cutting down the right things and leaving the things I supposed to leave John Nelson has masterminded the logistics behind all the restoration work at Halligan [Music] my main job in this garden now is gonna be literally doing all hard landscaping violet the stage whereby the actual planting takes place we've got the power to do the lawns to level borders to level there is an awful lot of work to be done there's something like five and a half thousand bricks to be laid into the pod which isn't done in five minutes but an actual time it will be around about six or seven weeks but with a good team I'm sure that we'll get it done [Music] already there's very little of value left in here really I mean most of its just overgrown with brambles and dock weed and that sort of thing there's one or two that are original part this is um stone tonyia which is one of the original vines that would have been on the wall so we're gonna try and salvage that this one rip tree that we're going to keep in the garden is called de vidya in volume art and it's from China and its nickname is the handkerchief tree or the ghost treat it has these two big white bract that hang down either side bract like leaves they hang down either side of the flower and lucius like a handkerchief once this garden is completed this is going to be a really good focal point [Music] Tobie Musgrave and Chris Gardner are responsible for the new design they are the ones that have condemned the self ceded beech tree as the shade would stifle the growth of the new plants to recreate a border herbaceous border about 1880 which predated anything that Gertrude G Hall did unfortunately we don't have much evidence of the herbaceous border at Heligan a few photographs and one article so my job is to go away and research pre 1880 herbaceous borders in libraries and look at books and magazines from that we found that there were various styles being proposed by various different authors authors at the time and I think Chris is the chap who can tell you exactly what we found and how we adapt yeah I mean what happened basically was the variety styles were blended together so what we have is plants roughly in rows but in groups with wall shrubs backing them all and the overall effect is this folio sort of luxuriance plenty of color throughout the year there's no strict color scheme we use lots of pinks and blues and a few sort of bright spots of reds and yellows where propia at the top here we have a small circular step and the pavement until there's intentionally different because we want to make the whole garden look distinct now the ground is cleared John could begin landscaping the new garden [Music] Annabel's main job over winter is to get the 10 foot wide herbaceous border ready for planting well the soil preparation is going to be the task that's going to take the longest time this winter it's absolutely crucial that we do it well because the whole success of the borders depends on doing this bit properly we found an awful lot of rubbish in there I mean the the borders haven't been touched for probably at least fifty years so there's a lot of root penetration from the brambles from all the self seeded trees that had grown up so there was a lot of rubbish to get out of the soil and then basically you incorporate as much organic matter as you can into the soil the work that we're doing will hopefully guarantee the the health of the plants for a long time to come because herbaceous border you don't rip it out and read it every year like you can with a vegetable garden you know to keep the soil fertility up and so on in in say four years time it'll be about time to take out all the plants and that you lift and divide herbaceous plants to retain their vigor mid November and John's six-week deadline to finish all the hard landscaping is nearly up all the late in the day now but just about complete don't be time-consuming it doesn't look a lot left but much in fact there's still two or three hours and basically them real ready for the gardening I would think about another ten days and we're complete in the near freezing temperatures of March the team finished preparing the flowerbeds before the plants they've ordered arrived okay what have you got the lime and you've got the vitex okay we're going to need to do is a sort of light dressing of both on the surface of the soil and then it's Mary you can sort of rake up behind them rake it into the surface yeah you can pick up any odd stones and stuff that we've missed and get the bumps and hollows out of it really so then we should be ready for marking out after that okay well the next stage once we finished making this level will be to mark it out and this is our beautiful plan here and what it involves basically all these blobs along this side represent the clumps of herbaceous plants that have got to go in here so what to get the layout right of the plant I need to sort of measure these and draw them out on in sand on on the bed about 1.7 along and about one point well I'll just meet you out I mean we're not trying to be that accurate really it's just a sort of vague we're not vague we're just trying to get the general spread of the plants right that's why we're sort of doing the back row first and then we could work sort of front to back to do it section by section but I want to make sure we've got the sort of right spread lengthways anyways that when the plants arrive we'll obviously had to sort of arrange them within what kind of space the plants are being delivered by Carol Klein from glebe cottage nurseries staying true to the spirit of this restoration all the plants are old-fashioned varieties typical of what would have been grown in an 1880 herbaceous border yeah well each of these little things is going to grow into something fairly massive something huge and spectacular as the bitterly cold weather of early spring melts away the older video tree to mark the warmer days throws out its handkerchiefs the stone tonyia is the only other original planting in the garden and now it's tied back it's romping away for the gardeners there's one more vital task to perform well this is the lawn and we've dug it over and we've raked it once to get all the stones and all the crap out of it and basically we've got to tread it because it's got to be nice and firm for the lawn seed to be sewn onto it so I go first best foot forward okay and you look really really stupid it's called synchronized stepping which is going to be made an Olympic sport I've been told the nation with the largest feet will obviously come first we need a music tape actually that way [Music] like a family of ducks right okay I gave you say [Music] the next job is to retrieve their lost sundial John Nelson has persuaded the current owners of Heligan house to allow it to be taken back to its old home right now Annabelle just see on the photograph which way those places blog on one of the corners yep and that has to face away from this direction that is right how it is looking perfect perfect [Music] I think there's been quite a lot of unrealistic expectations about this garden how how it's supposed to look magnificent in its first year and I'm astonished and delighted to say that it is looking pretty good already the Dharana combs were the first ones out there beautiful butter yellow The Veronicas the bees and butterflies have been all over ever since the first flower appeared this border the size of it it needs some really large stately plants so the Campania 'la which is over a six foot tall now really feels a good space and there's a strand to your major which is a lovely cottage garden plant it's got several nicknames including Hattie's pincushion and melancholy gentleman's sundial top itself which a stonemason is now carving that's going to be put in position with the sundial on the top so we haven't really got a lot of time at all it's been chasing the clock [Music] the moment of truth to the opening the guest of honor is Demarest romaine who remembers the original garden from her childhood what you will be seeing hopefully on the other side of this is garden which is seeking to celebrate 100 years after the article in Gardner's Chronicle which stated that the herbaceous border at Heligan was the finest in the land and I think you'll see that it's tart is lovely we've already discovered some flaws which will be putting right so we asked you to be gentle in your criticism because most of the things that you might say we've been far harsher about ourselves and the real taste tasting of this will be over the years to see what it really does fulfill its potential tini Clements who came from our nursery and I'm just amazed it's a plants and the people here can you see inside [Music] the last thing one might expect to find in the middle of the Cornish countryside is a jungle yet this is what the tremaine family created within the lost gardens of Heligan if anybody could see me now if you guys really enjoying it as we've excavated through here and taken out hundreds and hundreds of self-sowing trees we found underneath in these wonderful tree ferns over sixty different varieties of bamboos and a lot of specimen trees and what we're better doing here is returning it to its former glory but with the added spice of course that the tremaine family who conceived this garden never saw it as it at its best because they departed before everything had reached maturity so we actually have the privilege of seeing it as they never had the idea of the jungle was to provide a contrast to the formality of the other gardens of Heligan the slope of the valley combined with the mild temperatures of Cornwall have created a microclimate where subtropical plants flourish the collection of exotica was brought back by the great Victorian plant hunters from all corners of the globe their collections changed the face of the British landscape [Music] this garden was created by Squire John Claude Tremaine in the late 1880s Mike Halliwell is the new head gardener who now is responsible for the care of these rare plants there's four of us working in the jungle I've got Dave burns who's recently retired seaman 'james Hurd who is middle year student and Ken don't know what his surname is to be honest Kenneth who's been here since day one started in October of 91 when the first clearance began at the top today Mike's removing unwanted ivy forty foot up in the air from this tracky carcass yep gardening on the grand scale you know we're the largest restoration project in Europe and the jungle itself just one of the parts of the the estate is 25 acres so it's it's it's a very large ongoing process the poor thing has been strangled for the best part of a hundred years so we're going to prune the worst of it off what we can't do is drag every single piece out because it takes away all that the fibrous outer coating of the tree which is all part of the appeal and then the frost detection so we prune off the bulk of it and then leave the last of it to rot and fall off naturally in the course of time the IV started to take over when the gardens were abandoned somewhere around the beginning of the First World War obviously any garden any of land has a certain amount of ivy in it and it's it spreads unless kept under control and whenever it finds something that it can climb up up it goes it won't physically strangle a tree what can happen is either that it will get so very heavy that the weight of it drags the tree over and in this particular case that's that's quite a possibility if we don't get it finished soon the illusion of real jungle relies on a wild appearance but it's a fine line between luxuriant growth and chaos Kenneth's wage is a constant war on invaders Ken's very good at doing those repetitive on on and on jobs that are part and parcel of this kind of goth I do sometimes actually feel sorry for him xxx it's a job that has to be done and he's he's very capable and very suitable for doing that sort of work it's just something has got to be done and I don't mind doing it because I work on my own you can see what you've done at the end of the day the legacy of its derelict past may still be causing Kenneth's problems but after 2000 of the self-set sycamore and ash were removed the jungle took on a new lease of life [Applause] [Music] with the dense tree canopy gone the sunlight could finally penetrate British wildflowers germinated and bloomed after decades of dormancy creating bizarre contrasts with their subtropical neighbors [Music] accustomed to the gloom there was a concern that the light would be too much for these Australian tree ferns the reverse proved to be the case they burst into life alongside the bamboos which doubled in size [Music] despite the flourishing plants the restoration work goes on like a little baby perfectionist John Nelson is determined to create not just the look but the sound of the jungle through a series of waterfalls because the whole idea of this is to get a lovely lovely bit of noise of the water falling and crashing down the valley to create that lovely atmosphere that water does the the valleys lacking it at the moment and you know a lovely little ripples gonna make all the difference I think especially in the still sort of the evening early morning yeah that lovely little trickle rush of water and during the winter months of course it will be a raw well this really does get Lively it was originally ironically called the orchard the early postcards that we found dated from 1870 1880 that sort of time refers to is the orchard in inverted commas because what happened was they converted what was a large area of Cornish orchard into what we now know as the jungle garden and I believe that what happened was that John Claude when he took over in early 1900s changed its name to the Japanese garden because Japanese gardening was all the rage I mean they associated Japanese eree with bamboos the linear nature bamboos and water it had precious little else to do in Japanese than that weeding at haligan is a perennial activity for Kenneth it takes many forms as you see the blanket weed is all over the place if I don't clear it up every now and again it blanket weed it doesn't kills everything off because it takes you off to an out of water it's all right in some respect but no good for anything that lives in water [Music] mike has a more pleasant task for the day hanging out these staghorn face staghorn ferns come from the South Pacific from Australia and New Zealand round to Madagascar there their tree dwellers or epiphytes which means that they don't have any roots as such they collect all the food and water they want in these leaves and we've got leaves we've got bird droppings dust pollen anything that comes along rain water the leaves that we've got here are all sterile they're their vegetative to trap all the goodness at the plant once later on we'll get the strap-like leaves coming down that produced the spores and give it the common name if you think about a stags antlers the latin name is platy serum bifurcating by means dividing - it's not Hardy these have been in the greenhouse all winter but they should do very nicely out here in the shade on the north side of the tree through the summer for the public part of the gardens attraction is the storytelling tradition started by an enthusiastic Tim Schmitt and his team you see the big leaf rhododendron next to it is a very unprepossessing plant which has got flowers on it this is drew miss winter I one of the most unusual plants on earth because dream is winter eyes named after James Winter Captain James winter who's second in command Sir Francis Drake on the circumnavigation of the globe and as they were going through the Straits of Magellan at Tierra del Fuego his troops would get a mutinous because they were suffering from scurvy and he saw the chera del Fuego Indians on the coast making a soup out of the bark of this tree so he thought he'd give it a punt it was a miracle that James winter wasn't lynched immediately from the yardarm because what he he likened its flavor to being rhubarb to the power of 10 your tongue would stick instantly to your upper palate and remain there for the rest of the week but what winter had discovered or not to be politically incorrect what the chera del Fuego Indians had discovered was the most vitamin C rich plant on earth [Music] in the days of the tremaine's being able to show off new plant species was an important part of life for the landed families all over the country these rhododendrons were donated by another Cornish family from Sir Joseph hookers expedition in the middle 1800s [Music] the lemon family car clue which is from where we got most of the original hooker rhododendron seeds they they got them from cue and from Joseph Hooker direct from the expedition's and they were of course related to the tremaine's by Maharaj and they would have given any access that they had to the Jermaine's pond is changed in the old days we were much more civilized affairs not that I'm implying that this isn't civilized but you'd normally have sort of meet up and families would exchange seeds that they had been given very casual right it was it was it was like like stamp collecting million those days and the passion but bigger and bigger and bigger the more plants came into the country and captivated the interests of more people yes [Music] back in April the gunnera a native to the South American rainforest was woken up from its winter dormancy the new growth comes from the crown which was protected over winter by having a layer of its own leaves wrapped around it there's this thin late summer and the gunnera is now fully grown again to the maintenance of the jungle goes on all year round today the gardener's are clearing out the Gunnar is damaged and dying leaves there's a dead one just over your head nearly all dead that's the one yeah well have shot of him all right I think oh yes I can go that's a good relieves grower yeah that's right out from scratch I think it's the bass at the beginning there's more these this appears of his one that's where it'll sprout from next year already they're ready to grow away so long as I don't put it down where it gets misplaced again right so I'll say the leaf is about six foot cross wouldn't you say Mike yes it's about that isn't it Ken that's what the size the leaf growing every year don't they OH almost like upside down umbrella it's different like everything in this garden if you look around long enough you always find something different [Music] I know sounds kind of casual to lose thirty acres of formal gardens but that's in fact what happened here from 150 years these gardens had lain fallow and we'd take them to be just ordinary English woodland until by a bit of research we discovered that we were looking at miles and miles of formal Georgian galip's and rides even more excitingly there were several big features most notably or we take to be a series of lakes which were interlinked and one of our great thrill is gonna be trying put it all back together again and see what it looks like The Lost Valley is part of 300 acres of dense woodland that surround the lost gardens of Heligan in Georgian times rides and gallops wove their way through these leafy glades providing a private playground for the tremaine family the inhabitants of the big house today decades of unchecked growth has completely obscured its glorious past with no original Maps to go on Tim and John have assembled a team of experts to try and piece together a picture of the past when we first walked through here we were doing our first visual survey we were completely persuaded that we were looking through the remnants of an old Woods a lot of new regeneration but it was pretty impenetrable but we didn't think to question it further because the the garden there didn't appear on any plan it predates the first plans we have the garden warden from this wood so that's a regrowth it could be the regrowth from that yeah the Lost Valley was not just a leisure area Heligan had to be self-sustaining Tim and John found plenty of evidence that the woods were coppiced the larger timber was used for building work around the estate and the remainder turned into charcoal for fuel as far back as 1625 records show how that remains used local labor to produce charcoal in Heligan woods today their charcoal burning sycamore and ash the trees which have self-set since the valley is abandoned the decision to reintroduce the practice does not nostalgia for a lost tradition for John Nelson it offers practical advantages we could get the wood out of the valley but it's still no purpose behind the oven and firewood at the end of the day and it's far easier to take it out as charcoal which is a third of the weight and what it is to take it out in timber it does make a lot of sense than them the process really is some you stack the kiln you pour your fire down the center get it lit as he ferns away gradually slide the lid over and you'll find that the smoke turns into steam it's amazing what comes off of it once that turns into a nice blue smoke you put the lid down and seal it right up hopefully after that for days you should have the charcoal the clearance work continues into early summer a team of dray horses are removing the bigger timber for use in building work around the estate they're using horses because heavy machinery would damage the old pathways you can really see the landscape taking form especially this day I mean that's great give this damn Lynx up the the entrance from the fields up there took some road there runs back there yeah we were there and behind us there's a proper network of roads and right I think that's great you see yeah because these drawings that they that they show you the latest of disappear and shimmy around the back there they're making a real feature that oq saved is realized well I think you see this water disappearing around the corner right beyond Earth the earth is gonna be absolutely amazing oh yeah I think that effects in bloody stunningly good but here and here you know these beech trees reflecting in the water fire yeah the restoration philosophy in the Lost Valley is a composite and it's not possible to restore it to any particular period because that it really did evolve so much that we had to if you like establish a spirit of place an atmosphere that we wish to evoke using the framework that we like that there the gallops the riots with the beech trees and oak avenues the mine can get really carried away in a valley like this it's got to be secret and I think if I put it back as we say it now completely it wouldn't be secret so I'm gonna make it secret even with the help of the digger John Nelson has set himself another impossible deadline I think this Valley compared with the rest of the work we carried out the Halligan is different I'm not saying it's the biggest job it's not the biggest job by far because the machine's gonna do most of the work in here but it's another challenge certainly is another challenge and something different years ago they wouldn't have had massive machines like this it was done by hand the luxury of them was having the number of men hundreds of men I expect they did a thing like this out and clay line it build all these dams its waterways everywhere all over all over the other site all done by hand in comparison you take a job like this going back to the times when its first created it would be years of work I aim to do it with this machine five to six weeks which is quite remarkable it's going to be done [Music] [Music] this is far from the final restoration of Heligan Haven even started phase two goes right the way up there another 3/4 tomorrow and then of course we go downstream to another three hundred and some-odd acres so there's a lot of excitement to come I'm going to fish it put the estate back as it was this isn't a setup is it not no you're right who to ask me whether I was amazed by what John achieved in this short period of time I'd have to say no because I've seen him do it before but in truth I'm just really really excited about what he's achieved he's done I think this is his finest work to date and he's really put his heart into it and driven everybody I think there's a chance that I next season this will be the finest part the gardens that's a really exciting part to look forward to ok friendly I feel we still got an awful lot to do John's got a lot that he wants to do she'd be easier to do yes yeah I played two roles and both of them involve John and I working together the first does that keeper of the keys which is to ensure that you don't turn it into a pond sea garden you've got to always be on guard against becoming average and doing the thing that everybody expects you to do the second is I have one further challenge up my sleeve for John which is we've put back the past values just restored is if you like a tantalizing glimpse of the past reaching the present with a bit of modern interpretation the final thing would be to take the valley that is good not good a historic past to it not partly stark landscape and really see whether we could make an amazing contribution to make a garden the 21st century excellent wonderful well done John brilliant don't stop the light do we think of a shack on the rear really drew and that's it that's Russ double-glazing are in the middle and we shared with the Ducks no no this is a fine fine proposal I guess a good shrubbery going on so I'll be sick of this write-up there's some beautiful trees down there no question about that wait the night starts doing its work just reads rushes I can't wait gonna be a paradise some critics claim that the lost gardens of Heligan no longer lives up to its name has the restoration gone too far it's very easy at certain stages in a restoration to feel as if you're losing the plot that somehow the spirit that drove you to come to a place somehow somehow left you deserted you if you like I think for us the major problem has been that the infrastructure was so damaged by a lot of the overgrowth that there was here that there was a contradiction between having it open to the public and enjoying it as a lost garden so well they were called the lost gardens of Heligan we have in many places had to restore cut back regrow too if you like capture the spirit that was there but put the the basic quarter culture back I would actually like ideally now that we've done the clearance and a lot of the restoration to almost make it fall asleep anew to get back even closer to where we were on the day we discovered it but with a better balance would have culturally a bit more variety more color the nooks and crannies are what it's all about I believe a garden should be a wild and wonderful place and to somehow capture human spirit it's a piece of it's the ultimate perversion isn't it of nature to actually create a garden and if you're not perverse enough to make it really really attractive you're not really doing a job [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: VCI VHS Youtube Archive

Views: 270,371

Keywords: VCI, Video Collection International, Channel 4 Video, The Lost Gardens Of Heligan, Channel 4 Documentaries, Thomas & Friends, VCI VHS, Amber The Fangirl, Obsessed With Videos, Nostalgic Television, VHS Previewer 2000, George's retro channel, Gondarth, Shaun O'Hagan, Louis Walkden, Channel 4 Series, shanethechildhood kidsshowlover, Rosie & Jim, Heligan, Garden, Lowarth Helygen, Cornwall, UK, Conservation, Jungle, Forest

Id: _NVHGHEDkjE

Length: 92min 32sec (5552 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 04 2020