Heligan Gardens Cornwall
The Lost Gardens of Heligan near Mevagissey in Cornwall are one of the great garden restoration stories of the twentieth century, a Victorian garden of approximately 200 acres that fell into complete dereliction following the First World War when the estate staff were almost entirely lost to the fighting and which was restored from 1991 onward by Tim Smit, who subsequently went on to create the Eden Project. The gardens represent the most complete restoration of a Victorian productive and pleasure garden in Britain and the combination of the restored kitchen gardens, the Jungle garden, the Lost Valley and the Pleasure Grounds creates one of the most varied and most atmospheric garden experiences in the southwest.
The productive gardens of Heligan, including the vast walled kitchen gardens with their restored vine houses, melon yard and pineapple pit, represent the ambitions of a Victorian estate that sought to produce every variety of fruit, vegetable and exotic plant from its own resources. The restoration of these spaces, worked by a team of gardeners using Victorian techniques and varieties, creates a living record of the Victorian kitchen garden tradition that has largely disappeared from working estates.
The Jungle garden in the valley below the pleasure grounds, where tree ferns, gunnera, bamboo and exotic plants from the Southern Hemisphere grow in the shelter of the valley in conditions approaching the subtropical, provides the most dramatic visual contrast with the formal kitchen gardens above and represents the Victorian passion for exotic planting in its most complete surviving form.