The Lost Gardens of Heligan

Every year someone says around now that the mushroom season is over, but I distinctly remember years gone by when I scuffed through the carpet of brown leaves on the forest floor when out looking for them, and today there are still plenty of green ones left on the trees.

Seasons vary from place to place of course, and I have found edible boletus growing outside the office of Tim Smit at the Lost Gardens of Heligan in July, so I am hoping to find a few today in mid October, albeit a couple of hundred miles to the east. Maybe they just grew there then because he just has a way of getting people and plants to cooperate with the execution of his various naturalistic visions?

Years ago, before the Eden Project was even thought about, someone told me that Mr Smit was looking for someone to restore a crystal grotto that he had unearthed at Heligan, so I made a phone call to him and arranged to go down to Cornwall and meet him. He seemed quite happy to talk to me about it, but warned me that there wasn't much to restore as far as he could see.

When I arrived with H.I. we were warmly welcomed into his shed of an office on the grounds, and that's when I saw the mushrooms growing on a rough patch of grass outside. He seemed unimpressed when I expressed my astonishment at them - I suppose he had become used to vegetation springing up all around him and, at the time, he was just coming to the end of an epic battle against nature which had taken over the entire estate of Heligan, swallowing up acres of out-buildings and glass-houses that had been left unattended by a small army of gardeners who had been conscripted into a large army of soldiers and sent to fight the First World War over in France. None of them returned, and the gardens disappeared from the very memory of the grief-stricken wives and mothers left behind. Eventually these women died too, and by that time, the garden had been swallowed up by an impenetrable sea of brambles and wood to be lost geographically as well, until Tim Smit turned up almost 80 years later.

"This is where they used to grow pineapples" Tim pointed to a recently unearthed bank of walled beds covered with a surprisingly large amount of intact glass roofing. Large steel pipes which conveyed hot water to the beds from the boiler house ran through and around them, and he vowed to have this heating system up and running again before long. Having cleared all the land around the pond and set up walkways for the huge amount of visitors which were already making their way to Heligan, his mind was now focused on producing the first home-grown pineapple to be eaten on the estate for almost 100 years. His energy and enthusiasm was tangible and infectious as he guided us around the unfinished parts of the project, and we wondered what he would do with it all once this restoration was complete, but we had not heard of the Eden Project back then.

Eventually he left us to wander the gardens on our own, and we joined the rest of the public to meander through the pre-historic landscape of tree-ferns and giant rhubarb leaves, feeling like characters from Conan Doyle's 'The Lost World', which - in a way - I suppose we were.

"This must be it", I said to H.I. when I stumbled across a little man-made cave in one corner of the grounds. It was dark with newly removed earth, and I couldn't see anything like the glittering cavern of crystals that I had been lead to believe needed my expert attention.

Eventually, as my eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, I saw one rather plain and boring crystal vein running through a large block which was the lintel to the entrance. It is from whispers such as these that whole fantasies are confabulated, and I immediately knew that my services were not needed at Heligan now that the brambles had been slashed away. Shame really - I would have liked to have been involved with that project, even in a small way.

It was not a wasted journey though. Like I have said before, it is next to impossible to actually waste time, and if you have visited Heligan, you will know what I mean.