Plant hunters
A map of Tom’s World Garden
If you were with me last week you may recall I mentioned ‘serendipity’. I am on the look out for a plant hunter as part of a future episode and discovered that a garden visit booked a couple of months ago with the Garden Media Guild, was to meet a ‘plant hunter’.
So yesterday I headed out of London and within an hour’s train journey, I had left the grumpy crowd bemoaning the lack of working ticket machines and was walking along a footpath between fields. My destination was Lullingstone Castle. Now I don’t have the greatest memory for all those childhood visits to houses and gardens but for some reason the visit to Lullingstone Silk Farm in the 1970s is still there. Maybe because I was allowed to buy a small silk cocoon from the gift shop! But I also clearly remember the red and white leaflet, I think it might have been an A-Z of silk worms. Well, the silk worms are no longer at Lullingstone and according to Tom, who is the heir to Lullingstone and lives there, the grandmother who had the silkworms, kept them in the house and the smell as remembered by Tom’s dad was dreadful …as was the noise, as they munched their way through thousands of mulberry leaves!
Apologies, I digress. The reason we were there was to visit Tom Hart Dyke’s - World Garden. He grew up at Lullingstone Castle and was inspired to become a gardener by his granny - who gave a packet of seeds and a trowel to her 3 year old grandson and inspired a love of plants that is so plain to see; not just in terms of what he has done but as he bounds from plant to plant, spotting a new bud or explaining why a tree branch has survived harsh weather. His excitement at a cactus that was flowering for the first time in 16 years was joyful.
The world garden was planned during a less joyful time in 2000, when Tom and a friend were held captive by guerillas as they attempted to cross the Darien Gap. The ‘Gap’ is a remote, roadless crossing on the border between Colombia and Panama - more than 60 miles of dense rain forest, steep mountains and vast swamps. Many had warned them against crossing the ‘Gap’, as it was inhabited by various armed gangs. The Lonely Planet Guide simply said: ‘Don’t even think about it’. Tom was plant hunting looking for orchids and Paul, a traveller he met along the way, was looking for adventure. They were captured and held for 9 months, their families didn’t know if they were dead or alive. In the book they wrote after their experience - The Cloud Garden, Tom wrote of his decision to undertake this dangerous journey:
‘….there would be orchids there no-one else had seen. No botanist had been near this place for a least a decade. I would be the first! The idea of hunting plants and collecting their seeds in near virgin territory made my legs weaken with anticipation. It was the sort of opportunity I had dreamed of ever since spending the best part of a week counting orchids on the local golf course as a teenager. Nature provides the best ‘tips’ on orchid husbandry and there was every chance I could learn more about light intensity, anchor points, aspect, humidity and so on.’
This quote seems to sum up that desire to find and see things no one else has seen combined with a passion to understand as much as possible about your plant. So watch this space I hope that in series 2 we will make some connections between plant hunters across centuries.
Finally I am on the look out for more Plant Stories - so if you have one yourself, maybe just an idea you would like to discuss or you know someone that you think I should talk to - please do get in touch. You can email me: sally@ourplantstories.com I really hope that we can continue to travel around the world with the plant stories.