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May 30, 2008

Seed of a thought takes me back to Cornwall

I was thinking the other day about seeds.

Yes. I am exactly that boring.

Everyone always recommends you plant seeds in sterile potting soil, or advises you on ways to sterilize soil to kill anything that might kill young seedlings.

I’m not saying this is wrong at all.

It just made me wonder: People planted seeds for hundreds of years before they could drag home hundred pound bags of seed-start, or had access to ovens to heat trays of soil, or even had any clue what a bacterium or a fungus was, much less that it would harm seeds, or that heat would kill it.

They probably stood around in fields of slimy seedlings and scratched their heads a lot.

But that, in turn, made me remember a bold experiment in gardening that I visited a few years ago. An experimental vegetable garden employing the most up-to-date technology of its age, in Cornwall, UK.

And the thought made me happy. Happy enough to write about it days later.

If you’re thinking about the Eden Project — BZZZZZZZT! Sorry.

But you’re not far off.

Heligan, “The Willows” in Cornish, is down the road from the futuristic biodomes in the clay pits of Bodelva.

Heligan, on the other hand, in the village of Pentewan, St. Austell was the Tremayne family home for 400 years, inhabited by gardeners with some advanced ideas before the workers set down their tools in 1914 to fight in the Great War. Sixteen of the 22 gardeners died, and the estate went into decline. Cue the theme from Sleeping Beauty.

But in 1990 …. (This image from their site says it better than anything I could possibly write. If it’s working. If it’s not, you’re thinking I’m a complete mo-ron.)

“The Lost Gardens of Heligan” (the name of the book by Tim Smit, the main man behind both Heligan and The Eden Project) have been restored, and offer skeptics like me a view of how forward-thinking gardeners would have handled things before electricity, chemical fertilizers and search engines.

But their showstopper is their pineapple pit, currently the only working “pine” pit in Europe, but once common until fast sailing ships could speed you a fruit from the islands with less trouble than growing your own.

The pit is a wonder: Resembling a cold frame, it heated only by rotting manure. According to the book, chambers maintain varying temperatures to serve differing needs in the growth and ripening cycle of the plants. An underground pipe carries warm effluent away, warming an area of soil for other tender plants to grow in. Wish I knew the Cornish word for "cool".

The trouble, apparently, isn’t getting hot enough – it’s that the pit gets so hot it kills the plants or spoils the fruit. Sometimes the pits even burst into flame!

If that doesn’t wow you, The Jungle, home to tree ferns, gunnera and other exotic species that survive in Cornwall’s sub-tropical climate, looks like something a dinosaur might call home.

I visited both Heligan and The Eden Project a few years ago and much preferred Heligan. But travel, and gardens are very personal things, so your experience might be different. If you’re pressed for time, you could see them both the same day.

Or just travel by photo or book.

At any rate, remember the clever people who had high tech gardens before the word “tech” even existed.

Posted by Paula Constantine  at 5:11 PM | Permalink

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