Heligan: The Complete Works Book

Let's face it, Channel 4's series The Lost Gardens of Heligan was so laid-back it was practically horizontal. Its leisurely traipse round the gardens and leisure grounds of Heligan House had the most engaged viewer plucking at the sofa. Thank goodness this book communicates a real enthusiasm and sensitivity fatally missing from the original series. Tim Smit is the successful record producer whose long-forgotten archeology degree from Durham sank its fangs into him from behind, as it were, in 1987. That was the year he met John Willis, who had just inherited the gardens, and explored with him what would become his life's work--the wilderness and scrap from which he would recreate one of the finest gardens of the period immediately prior to the Great War. Heligan: The Complete Works details the lives of Heligan's original gardeners--a history assembled from archeological evidence, old photographs, and, vitally, the memories of the very old: people whose knowledge would otherwise be irretrievably lost in a very few years' time. The bond of understanding Smit's team are forging with their forebears here was movingly evoked in September 1998 by Heather Keir-Cross's exhibition of ice sculptures, Ghosts of Gardens Past. Photographs of the deliberately ephemeral exhibition are a powerful visual expression of Smit's concern for a vanishing generation and the skills they take with them, and are the visual highlight of a book crammed with elegiac photographs, past and present.--Simon IngsRead More