Tresco
Tresco is an island in the Isles of Scilly archipelago, located off the southwestern tip of Cornwall in the United Kingdom. It is the second largest of the inhabited islands in the group and is widely regarded as one of the most beautiful and unusual places in Britain. The island is perhaps best known for Tresco Abbey Garden, a world-famous subtropical garden that thrives in the island's extraordinarily mild microclimate, warmed by the Gulf Stream. Unlike the other inhabited islands of Scilly, Tresco is privately managed as a single estate, leased from the Duchy of Cornwall, which gives it a distinctive, carefully maintained character quite unlike anywhere else in England. Visitors come from across the world to walk its lanes, explore its garden, and experience a genuine sense of remoteness and tranquility that is increasingly rare.
The history of Tresco stretches back to early Christian times, when a Benedictine priory was founded on the island in the tenth or eleventh century, traditionally associated with St Nicholas. The ruins of this priory stand within the grounds of Tresco Abbey Garden and give the garden its name. The island was long home to small communities of fishermen and kelp burners, but its modern character was shaped decisively by Augustus Smith, a Hertfordshire landowner who took the lease of the Isles of Scilly in 1834 and established his home on Tresco. Smith transformed the windswept terrain by planting extensive windbreaks of Monterey pine and cypress, and within their shelter he began creating the remarkable garden that bears the name of the old priory. He was also a reforming figure across the archipelago, building schools and insisting on education for all island children. The garden has been maintained and extended by successive generations of the Dorrien-Smith family ever since, now covering roughly seventeen acres.
Tresco Abbey Garden is the centrepiece of any visit and is genuinely extraordinary. The garden contains over twenty thousand plant species from more than eighty countries, many of them tropical or subtropical in origin — plants that simply could not survive in the open air elsewhere in Britain. Towering dragon trees, massive aloes, proteas, echiums of astonishing height, and a vast array of South African, Mediterranean, Australian and South American species grow in rich profusion. The garden is terraced on a south-facing hillside, giving it warmth and drama, and at its heart stand the moss-covered ruins of the old priory, which lend a romantic, slightly melancholy beauty to the whole. Within the garden is also the Valhalla Museum, a collection of carved figureheads and name boards salvaged from ships wrecked on the treacherous reefs of Scilly over the centuries — a haunting and poignant display.
Beyond the garden, Tresco itself is a place of remarkable natural beauty. The island stretches roughly three miles from north to south and is characterised by a dramatic contrast between its sheltered, pastoral southern end and the wilder, more exposed northern end, where Atlantic winds have sculpted the heathland into low, wind-bent vegetation and exposed outcrops of granite. The island has several excellent beaches, including Appletree Bay and Pentle Bay on the eastern side, whose white shell-sand and clear turquoise water could easily be mistaken for a Caribbean or Mediterranean shore. The interior of the island is crisscrossed by quiet lanes and footpaths, and the absence of public motor vehicles gives the whole place a peaceful, time-shifted quality. Birdsong, the sound of the sea, and the crunch of sand or gravel underfoot are the dominant sensory experiences.
Tresco is entirely surrounded by shallow, extraordinarily clear water rich in marine life, and the seascape around it is punctuated by outcrops and reefs. The other inhabited islands of Scilly — St Mary's, St Agnes, Bryher, and St Martin's — are all visible from various points on the island, and the uninhabited Eastern and Western Rocks lie further out. The inter-island channels are popular with sailors, kayakers, and wildlife-watchers; grey seals are common throughout the archipelago and can often be seen hauled out on rocks near Tresco. The skies above are equally alive: Scilly sits on important migration routes and attracts birdwatchers from across Britain, particularly in autumn, when rare American and Siberian vagrants appear with remarkable regularity.
Getting to Tresco requires either a helicopter flight from Penzance (a wonderfully atmospheric journey of around twenty minutes) or a boat from St Mary's, which is itself reached by the Scillonian ferry from Penzance or by small plane from Land's End, Newquay, or Exeter airports. There is no public ferry direct from the mainland to Tresco; visitors typically arrive at St Mary's and take the inter-island boat service from there to Tresco's Carn Near quay. The island is managed as a private estate and most accommodation consists of self-catering cottages and the island hotel, the New Inn, all bookable through Tresco Estate. Day visitors are entirely welcome and can visit Tresco Abbey Garden for an admission fee. The island has a small shop and a couple of places to eat, but it is advisable to plan ahead, especially in shoulder seasons.
The best time to visit is broadly from spring through early autumn, with the garden at its most spectacular during spring when aloes, aeoniums, and early flowering exotics are in bloom, and again in summer when the terraces are warm and the beaches are at their most inviting. However, even in winter Tresco has a devoted following; the garden remains open year-round and the island takes on a quieter, more contemplative beauty in the off-season, when the light over the water is often extraordinary. One of the most remarkable hidden facts about the island is that the subtropical plants of the garden would be destroyed by even a single severe frost, and the estate goes to considerable lengths to protect the most vulnerable specimens during cold snaps — yet the climate of Tresco is so mild that hard frosts are genuinely rare events, a consequence of the island's oceanic position and the warming influence of the Gulf Stream that makes this corner of Britain climatically unique.