Standing on top of Everest in shorts and wellingtons, clutching a spade, Tom Hart Dyke looks contemplative, before breaking into a smile. “I’ve never been up here before,” he says. “It’s going to be great.”
Mount Everest is a sandy heap of soil 6ft high. In a couple of years it will be covered with alpine plants — gentians, primulas and meconopsis — all of which grow on the slopes of the original. It is the highest point of Hart Dyke’s three-dimensional horticultural map of the world, which he has spent the past three years creating in the walled garden of his family’s home, Lullingstone Castle, near Eynsford, Kent.
Surveying his garden, which opened to the public this spring, Hart Dyke, 29, a self-taught plant-hunter and “gardening nut”, is a long way from the Colombian jungle where the idea was conceived.
In 2000, Hart Dyke and a fellow backpacker, Paul Winder, tried to cross the Darien Gap, the narrow stretch of land that links Central and South America, one of the most lawless jungles on Earth. They were in search of adventure and, in Hart Dyke’s case, orchids.
“When I was nine I discovered orchids and that was it, game over,” he says. “A hobby became an obsession. I tried to count every native orchid on the golf course near my home. Four days later, I finished. I had counted 63,424.”
In Colombia, on the southern edge of the Darien Gap, less than half a day’s walk from the border with Panama, Hart Dyke and Winder were attacked by an armed gang. They were held captive for nine months, “waltzing round the jungle like a school trip gone wrong”. Never one to miss an opportunity, Hart Dyke began to cultivate his own garden when the captors set up camp. The kidnappers burnt his seeds.
One day, the captives were told they were going to be killed and their bodies dismembered. “I sat down and began to design a garden to relieve the tension,” says Hart Dyke, who seems remarkably unaffected by his ordeal. “I wanted a stock of plants with big leaves, pungent smells and colourful flowers, so that once people saw what a plant looked like when it was mature, they would buy it from the nursery. Irresistible.”
The kidnappers never issued a ransom demand and released the pair just before Christmas 2000. During his ordeal, Hart Dyke had persuaded his kidnappers that he was a jardinero, a gardener, but his love of orchids baffled them. “They could relate to digging and weeding, but they couldn’t understand how popular gardening was in the UK, or orchids, or that it wasn’t about money, but for ornamental purposes.”
The Lullingstone garden is not about pretty planting and colour schemes. It is a Boy’s Own horticultural adventure. Eventually, it will contain about 10,000 species, grouped by country of origin. So far, he has planted more than 3,000.
“The ground hasn’t seen so much soil disturbance since Queen Anne visited the castle,” says Hart Dyke. “We have the world’s largest collection of speedwells and spend most of the time weeding.”
Until this year, the project has mainly been underground. Two large soakaways are now in place below the flinty soil, as well as hundreds of metres of electrical cable so that taller specimens, such as wellingtonia (giant sequoia) and coastal redwoods, which can grow to more than 90m, can be lit. Low-voltage spotlights will also be used to uplight sculptural plants, such as spiky cacti and cycads.
“I genuinely believe it is a ground- breaking garden. It’s like the Eden Project without the roof,” says Hart Dyke. “It’s not a question of putting colours next to each other, but telling the story of plant-hunters.” Labels will identify each plant — and those who first brought it back to these shores.
Those men include George Forrest, an early 20th-century botanist who introduced more than 1,200 new plants to Britain. Forrest was the only one of 18 collectors to escape gangs of marauding warrior priests along the Chinese border with Tibet in 1905. And David Douglas, whose North American adventures yielded the Douglas fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii), among hundreds of others. He died in Hawaii in 1834, gored to death by a wild bull in a pit.
“You don’t find that out in Homebase,” says Hart Dyke. “Without these people, we would have no lupins, no delphiniums. Imagine an English garden without them. It is essential to tell their stories.”
When Hart Dyke started, the two-acre garden was crammed with heavy yews and a derelict orchard. He brought in pigs to “snortivate” the land, chomping their way through 6ft-tall grass and shrubbery to clear the site, and enlisted the help of Adam Bailey, a garden designer.
Together they scaled down “the world” to fit the site. “There is some artistic licence,” admits Hart Dyke. “We got a map, deleted all the countries we didn’t want, and then haggled over the rest.” So Tasmania is half the size of Australia, Madeira and the Canary Islands are squashed onto mainland Europe, and the Caribbean has bitten the dust.
Walking on shimmering blue paths made of recycled windscreen glass — the oceans — Hart Dyke shows me his world. Each land mass is hemmed in with a specially chosen stone reflecting the soils of the countries and continents. Ayers Rock is in place. So, too, the Asian waterfall that will harbour orchid primulas, Asian marsh marigolds and wisteria.
He points to a huge tree fern donated by Tregear Gardens in Cornwall, which stands proudly in the centre of New Zealand. Then, smiling, he makes his way to Britain, which is bordered with red granite. This is his favourite: he points out the gorse in the New Forest, Welsh daffodils, bird cherry, rowan and Scots pine.
About 65% of the plants Hart Dyke has chosen are already at Lullingstone. He has grown more than 2,000 himself, which he overwintered in his fridge and in the greenhouse. Some were from seeds that he sent home before he was kidnapped and from previous travels to Sumatra sponsored by the Royal Horticultural Society.
In the greenhouse, jasmine jostles with prickly acacia, while neatly potted geraniums stand in the shadow of an 8ft cactus. Spiny opuntias (“well-armed beasts”) from New Mexico huddle next to a young baobab tree, brought back from central Africa by his mother, Sarah.
Hart Dyke and Winder opened the garden on March 16 — five years after their kidnap — by planting an Agave americana just above the Darien Gap. “I chose it because Paul hates orchids,” says Hart Dyke. “And because it is the spiniest and prickliest of all the plants — which was a pain to plant.”
Hart Dyke now lives in the castle’s gatehouse. He is on one side and his 91-year-old grandmother, Mary (or “Crac”, as she is called by the family), is on the other. “We meet in the middle arches for gardening conferences.”
The world garden is not just a whimsical dream or green-fingered therapy, but also a huge financial gamble for the Hart Dyke family. The original estate of about 9,000 acres has shrunk to 120, and the costs of maintaining the 500-year-old castle and lands have swallowed a fortune. The family had to mortgage the property to raise the £150,000 needed for the garden.
So far, the project has come in under budget at £121,000. Hart Dyke has plans to convert a ramshackle Victorian glasshouse into his own orchid house and to set up a nursery. His ambition is to show 7,000 specimens in their country of origin and 3,000 in the borders, to show man’s influence and cultivation.
“Brits have a tendency to say we can’t do exotic plants and should stick to what we know. But about 99% of plants in our gardens were introduced from other countries. I want people to look and learn.”
It is heartening to see such a young gardener with a light touch and a serious mission. Hart Dyke wants to educate garden societies and thrill school children to encourage a love of learning and horticulture.
Far from the boggy sites, stinky gulleys and lush jungle canopies of his earlier adventures, the garden at Lullingstone is a labour of love and obsession. “I forget to meet my friends in the pub,” he admits. “Relationships have suffered.”
Now, at last, he will get to share his love of spiky, exotic plants with the British public, from the safety of his own home.
- The World Garden of Plants is open Wednesday-Sunday, April to October, entrance £5.50; 01322 862 114, www.lullingstonecastle.co.uk
- The Cloud Garden by Tom Hart Dyke and Paul Winder, Corgi, £7.99
- Adam S Bailey Design, 01322 865 566, www.adamsbailey.com
Rachel de Thame is away
