Kitchen Gardens at Heligan

de Tom Petherick, Melanie Eclare

"The huge popularity of 'The Lost Gardens of Heligan' is in no small part due to the painstaking restoration of the gardens to their former heyday. Chief amongst the attractions are the remarkable Victorian and Edwardian productive gardens with their walled enclosures providing protection for climbers and vegetables, glasshouses for every kind of tender fruit, and bothies to shelter the many gardeners, under-gardeners and apprentices, all under the command of the formidable figure of the Head Gardener. A high proportion of this army of gardeners went off to the First World War, never to return, and the gardens, once so well-ordered, reverted slowly to a tangle of vegetation as time and decay took their toll. But the magnificent restoration, the accompanying television series and bestselling book, gave Heligan a new lease of life. Today the gardens once more house an army of gardeners and the old varieties of fruit and vegetables are again growing (that is, apart from the cucumbers - the Victorian varieties are too bitter for modern tastes). Once the gardens would have made the great house at Heligan self-sufficient in produce, today their harvest feeds the huge number of visitors.