Only four of those 13 gardeners returned.
April 17, 2022 9:32 AM Subscribe
Cornwall’s sleeping beauty: the tale of Heligan’s lost gardens The story of the rediscovery of the Lost Gardens of Heligan just over 30 years ago has all the ingredients and romance of a modern-day Sleeping Beauty: a brave prince battles through impenetrable thorns to awaken a beautiful princess who has fallen asleep for nearly 80 years. He rouses her with a kiss and they live happily ever after.
Some beautiful images and a little history for your easter sunday.
Some beautiful images and a little history for your easter sunday.
Neat!
posted by zengargoyle at 10:05 AM on April 17, 2022
posted by zengargoyle at 10:05 AM on April 17, 2022
That is fascinating! If I ever visit England again, that will be near the top of my list.
posted by davidmsc at 10:10 AM on April 17, 2022
posted by davidmsc at 10:10 AM on April 17, 2022
We went there in February 2019! It was lovely.
This is not any kind of insight, but the locations had pretty Soulsborne names: The Jungle, The Lost Valley, The Steward's House, etc.
posted by smcg at 10:22 AM on April 17, 2022
This is not any kind of insight, but the locations had pretty Soulsborne names: The Jungle, The Lost Valley, The Steward's House, etc.
posted by smcg at 10:22 AM on April 17, 2022
They do an annual December long Christmas walking tour with bits lit up, etc which makes for a nice visit in the even around Christmas, makes for a pleasant family visit if you are around at that time of year.
posted by biffa at 10:56 AM on April 17, 2022
posted by biffa at 10:56 AM on April 17, 2022
Would have liked even more details and photos, but this is a great story.
posted by blue shadows at 1:53 PM on April 17, 2022
posted by blue shadows at 1:53 PM on April 17, 2022
I spent some of my early childhood in the 50s, at Penstowe Manor, a very similar estate in north Cornwall. Semi-tropical plants, decaying greenhouses, only one full-time gardener (my dad) where there had been 8 before the wars etc. Like Heligan at the start, most of it had been left to run wild, with only the lawns, the water garden and the herbaceous border kept up, and they were still a bit overgrown, with duckweed all over the ponds. There was a Jungle there too, like Heligan's, with palms, Gunnera and bullrushes around a little pond that my father would row me about on. What was left of the greenhouses had hyge old trees and vine, still flowering like mad (camellias) and producing fruit (grapes and apricots, despite the missing panes.
Penstow didn't get a prince - some time in the 70s the whole place was flattened, except for the main house, and built over with hoiiday cottages, but Heligan brought back a lot of memories when I visited.
posted by Fuchsoid at 2:04 PM on April 17, 2022 [13 favorites]
Penstow didn't get a prince - some time in the 70s the whole place was flattened, except for the main house, and built over with hoiiday cottages, but Heligan brought back a lot of memories when I visited.
posted by Fuchsoid at 2:04 PM on April 17, 2022 [13 favorites]
We visited Heligan twice in 2010 (spent two whole days there and took 100's of pictures), learned so much there and still working ideas from there into spaces and gardens. And yes it was a learning run towards the Eden Project - I'd recommend visiting it first then Eden - esp. if you're a hort/landscape person. Also near-ish by is Trengwainton which is closer to Fuchsoid's experience as it seemed to have two gardeners and run on a shoestring, but had a great little cafe.
Heligan was so well organised, and yet not regimented unlike a lot of the UK, probably due to more normal people founding and running it.
posted by unearthed at 3:27 PM on April 17, 2022 [3 favorites]
Heligan was so well organised, and yet not regimented unlike a lot of the UK, probably due to more normal people founding and running it.
posted by unearthed at 3:27 PM on April 17, 2022 [3 favorites]
My mother visited Heligan, and talked about her visit for the rest of her life, it made such a deep impression on her.
posted by humbug at 5:44 PM on April 17, 2022 [4 favorites]
posted by humbug at 5:44 PM on April 17, 2022 [4 favorites]
We went last summer and were both thoroughly, thoroughly underwhelmed, especially for the price. We'd planned to spend most of the day there but were all done and ready to leave within a couple of hours.
The more formal parts all felt a bit underbaked and gone to seed, while the "wilder" parts were no nicer or more interesting than the bits of woodland at my local park. The jungle garden was the best part and what I was most excited about but we saw it all in about ten minutes and that was that.
The story is definitely interesting and I am sure the gardens will only get better as they are developed - but having seen quite a few absolutely jaw-dropping gardens and estates in the UK, this just isn't one of them (for me, anyway - obviously quite a few commenters here and their families very much disagree!).
posted by cilantro at 4:16 AM on April 18, 2022 [1 favorite]
The more formal parts all felt a bit underbaked and gone to seed, while the "wilder" parts were no nicer or more interesting than the bits of woodland at my local park. The jungle garden was the best part and what I was most excited about but we saw it all in about ten minutes and that was that.
The story is definitely interesting and I am sure the gardens will only get better as they are developed - but having seen quite a few absolutely jaw-dropping gardens and estates in the UK, this just isn't one of them (for me, anyway - obviously quite a few commenters here and their families very much disagree!).
posted by cilantro at 4:16 AM on April 18, 2022 [1 favorite]
would happily take some recommendations for those gardens and estates here as we enter the "national trust properties are good, actually" phase of our lives!
posted by ominous_paws at 4:42 AM on April 18, 2022
posted by ominous_paws at 4:42 AM on April 18, 2022
ominous_paws maybe I'll make a whole post of garden and estate reviews but as a starter...
Chatsworth House itself is kind of meh to me (feels silly to call a massive stately home with a million rooms "meh" but it just isn't my favourite)- however the vegetable gardens and the rock garden/strid, along with the folly at the top of the hill with the long water feature leading down to the house, are outstanding. I could spend a whole day in just the rock garden-"rock garden" really does it a disservice because it actually consists of all kinds of boulders and rock formations with beautiful views and shapes that reveal themselves as you walk around and through it. The vegetable gardens are great too if you're a gardening nerd, so many kinds of vegetables and herbs and fruit trees growing in all different kinds of beds and small orchards that are beautiful and practical in equal measure.
Other faves include:
Cragside in Northumberland - as much for the house which, in spite of being, like all stately homes, a ridiculously over-the-top monument to ego and excess, somehow feels cosy and liveable in a way that other stately homes never do. It was also one of the first private buildings in the UK to have electricity, with its own hydroelectric power and early battery storage system which is absolutely fascinating- not just the power system but all the various gadgets and gizmos it powered in the house. The gardens and woodland are lovely and have a wild and untamed feeling which is surprising considering that it was pretty barren before the estate was built and almost every tree there was planted when the estate was created.
Temple Newsam in Leeds- visit when the rhododendrons are in bloom. It's a bit scruffier than some other stately homes and gardens which is probably because it's owned by Leeds City Council instead of the National Trust or by a private trust. It's still great though and the house itself isn't exactly beautiful but it's kind of weird and fascinating. I don't believe in ghosts but the house feels like it has a sort of malevolent air to it. There is a small rare breed farm as well which is fun.
And for something different, the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, which isn't a garden as such but a huge park dotted with large-scale modern sculpture - you can walk for hours and still not see it all.
posted by cilantro at 7:00 AM on April 18, 2022 [5 favorites]
Chatsworth House itself is kind of meh to me (feels silly to call a massive stately home with a million rooms "meh" but it just isn't my favourite)- however the vegetable gardens and the rock garden/strid, along with the folly at the top of the hill with the long water feature leading down to the house, are outstanding. I could spend a whole day in just the rock garden-"rock garden" really does it a disservice because it actually consists of all kinds of boulders and rock formations with beautiful views and shapes that reveal themselves as you walk around and through it. The vegetable gardens are great too if you're a gardening nerd, so many kinds of vegetables and herbs and fruit trees growing in all different kinds of beds and small orchards that are beautiful and practical in equal measure.
Other faves include:
Cragside in Northumberland - as much for the house which, in spite of being, like all stately homes, a ridiculously over-the-top monument to ego and excess, somehow feels cosy and liveable in a way that other stately homes never do. It was also one of the first private buildings in the UK to have electricity, with its own hydroelectric power and early battery storage system which is absolutely fascinating- not just the power system but all the various gadgets and gizmos it powered in the house. The gardens and woodland are lovely and have a wild and untamed feeling which is surprising considering that it was pretty barren before the estate was built and almost every tree there was planted when the estate was created.
Temple Newsam in Leeds- visit when the rhododendrons are in bloom. It's a bit scruffier than some other stately homes and gardens which is probably because it's owned by Leeds City Council instead of the National Trust or by a private trust. It's still great though and the house itself isn't exactly beautiful but it's kind of weird and fascinating. I don't believe in ghosts but the house feels like it has a sort of malevolent air to it. There is a small rare breed farm as well which is fun.
And for something different, the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, which isn't a garden as such but a huge park dotted with large-scale modern sculpture - you can walk for hours and still not see it all.
posted by cilantro at 7:00 AM on April 18, 2022 [5 favorites]
I started reading TFA and kind of went sidewise on a Google safari pretty early on.
Here is a thing to keep in mind when you're next admiring the sets and costumes on Downton Abbey: it used to be a thing, on some spiffy English estates, for there to be a special hothouse built into the ground for the growing of pineapples. And these little hothouses were hot, because they were heated by the rotting of manure. Lots of manure. 15,000kg according to Wikipedia.1
It was the job of many somebodys to keep the manure rotting going at a clip that would ripen pineapples in an English winter, so that a few of them could be consumed by the owners.
I am sure the gardens are magnificent. In somewhat the same way that B-2 bombers are beautiful machines.
1I am sad to have not had this fact at my fingertips when the discussion was about growing citrus in Russia.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 8:30 AM on April 18, 2022 [5 favorites]
Here is a thing to keep in mind when you're next admiring the sets and costumes on Downton Abbey: it used to be a thing, on some spiffy English estates, for there to be a special hothouse built into the ground for the growing of pineapples. And these little hothouses were hot, because they were heated by the rotting of manure. Lots of manure. 15,000kg according to Wikipedia.1
It was the job of many somebodys to keep the manure rotting going at a clip that would ripen pineapples in an English winter, so that a few of them could be consumed by the owners.
I am sure the gardens are magnificent. In somewhat the same way that B-2 bombers are beautiful machines.
1I am sad to have not had this fact at my fingertips when the discussion was about growing citrus in Russia.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 8:30 AM on April 18, 2022 [5 favorites]
Being able to devote a whole range of greenhouses to growing pineapples, not to mention the manpower required, and to present a home-grown pineapple at dinners was a huge marker of wealth before ships were fast enough to import them. In the winter, there were shifts of gardener's boys (young teenagers just starting in the job) who kept the manure piles topped up and adjusted to maintain the right temperature around the clock. Probably not such a terrible job in winter - nice and warm at least. Simpler beds heated with horse manure were also used to grow very early season crops of fruit and salads, hence the term "hotbed". Up until the first world war, the big estates prided themselves on producing early and out-of-season fruits especially, but also vegetables like asparagus. When the family were up in London for the season, the gardners would send daily crates of produce up by train.
This is why pineapples had become such a huge status symbol by the early 19th centuiry that you could rent one out by the night to adorn your dinner party, but not to eat. One of my favourite bits of the BBC comedy Ghosts is when a regency ghost is describing a party and someone else chimes in asking if they had little chunks of cheese and pineapple on cocktail sticks and he replies "Pineapple? They were rich but they weren't royalty".
I had always thought that the first pineapple in England was grown by Charles II's gardener Mr Rose, but according to this excellent article it's more complicated than that.
posted by Fuchsoid at 6:48 PM on April 18, 2022 [1 favorite]
This is why pineapples had become such a huge status symbol by the early 19th centuiry that you could rent one out by the night to adorn your dinner party, but not to eat. One of my favourite bits of the BBC comedy Ghosts is when a regency ghost is describing a party and someone else chimes in asking if they had little chunks of cheese and pineapple on cocktail sticks and he replies "Pineapple? They were rich but they weren't royalty".
I had always thought that the first pineapple in England was grown by Charles II's gardener Mr Rose, but according to this excellent article it's more complicated than that.
posted by Fuchsoid at 6:48 PM on April 18, 2022 [1 favorite]
Uh so how much work is involved in this horse manure plant heating? Should I try to get a greenhouse at the barn?
posted by sepviva at 7:10 PM on April 18, 2022
posted by sepviva at 7:10 PM on April 18, 2022
The hotbeds reminded me of this post from a couple of years ago about fruit walls. Less horse manure, more masonry. Probably not able to grow pinapple in northern Europe, though.
posted by Harald74 at 1:47 AM on April 20, 2022
posted by Harald74 at 1:47 AM on April 20, 2022
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posted by zengargoyle at 10:01 AM on April 17, 2022 [1 favorite]