FINDING THE PERFECT LOCATION

 

It took me a while to find an English location for The Forgotten Garden: I knew it had to be coastal and I wanted a history of smuggling because it fed into the overarching fairytale feel I was hoping to create.

I auditioned a number of stretches of English coastline before coming, by chance, across a mention on the internet of a place called The Lost Gardens of Heligan. Well, that's just the sort of title to get my interest piqued so I set out searching for any information I could find on the lost gardens. It turned out that Heligan was a grand country estate in Cornwall, owned for many centuries by an aristocratic family called the Tremaynes.

Along with the house and farms, Heligan was also home to the most glorious formal gardens. Generations of green thumbs had scoured the globe bringing back samples of the world's varied vegetation, and a team of thirteen gardeners were in charge of maintaining The Antipodean garden, the Italian garden, and the African garden, to name but a few.

In 1914, however, when world war one broke out, the entire garden staff enlisted and none returned.
The Tremayne family moved away, the garden grew over, and time and people forgot what had once been.

It wasn't until late in the twentieth century that a garden archaeologist, who had grown up nearby, returned home and rediscovered the entrance to Heligan.

With a BBC film crew recording the project, the garden was restored and is now open to the public. The idea of a once-glorious, much loved garden that time had forgotten was too irresistible for me to leave alone. My story had not only found its Cornish location, it had also acquired a forgotten garden (and a new title!).