Fomer hostage Tom Hart Dyke
An award-winning garden dreamed up by a British man while he was held hostage in the Colombian jungle looks set to save the future of a historic castle.
The World Garden at Lullingstone Castle is on schedule to be completed for the start of this year’s visitor season next month.
And the story is being featured on Mondays on BBC2 in a show called “Return to Lullingstone Castle”.
The series follows a similar documentary screened on the future of the historic monument screened last year.
After three years of hard work the innovative design for a garden laid out in the shape of a map of the world containing rare plants collected by Tom Hart Dyke, 30, on plant hunting trips around the globe has finally taken shape.
When completed next month it will have 10,000 species of plants in the one-acre garden which is expected to attract 20,000 visitors a year.
The concept for the garden came from extreme adversity when Mr Hart Dyke, one of the UK’s leading young botanists, was kidnapped by Colombian guerillas on a plant hunting expedition that went disastriously wrong in March 2000.
He and friend Paul Winder, 35, were looking for rare orchids in the Darien Gap, a lawless region of Panama rife with warring factions, when they were abducted.
They were held hostage for nine months in Colombia and regularly threatened with execution by the gun and machete-toting guerillas.
At midday on June 16, 2000, when they had been held captive for three months, the FARC rebels told Mr Hart Dyke and Mr Winder to prepare to die that night.
After being told they would be shot in the head and then cut up into pieces, the friends were put back in separate huts at the mountain camp.
Mr Winder spent the afternoon praying, but to stay sane Mr Hart Dyke dreamt up the idea for his World Garden, as he wanted to leave a legacy behind him.
They were not executed and released after another six months in captivity.
After he returned home to his family’s ancestral home, Lullingstone Castle, near Sevenoaks in Kent, Mr Hart Dyke found the design for his garden in his diary.
The plant hunter decided to build the garden to stop his family sliding into bankruptcy and losing their family seat.
Twenty generations of Hart Dykes have lived at the castle for 600 years, making it one of the oldest family homes in England.
Lullingstone Castle was opened to the public in 1950 - attracting 50,000 visitors during its heyday - but this number had fallen to just 2,000 by 2002.
With meagre finances his eccentric parents Guy and Sarah were struggling to keep the roof on their castle - a favourite haunt of Queen Anne and a young Henry VIII.
So the young plant hunter decided his garden was the way to bring visitors flocking and drag the castle into the 21st-century.
There are now 8,000 plants in the World Garden and the final 2,000 are due to be bedded before it opens to the public on April 1.
Mr Hart Dyke said: “It has been going brilliantly. The 2,000 plants will be going in soon and we are building a waterfall.
“The more plants that go in, the more excited I get.”
But as well as safeguarding the future of his ancestral home, the garden has also allowed him to exercise the painful memories from being held hostage.
He said: “Gardening is therapeutic anyway, so the World Garden has completely been about that for me.
“I went to Venezulua just before Christmas on a plant hunting trip, which was the first time I had been back to South America in six years since being kidnapped.
“It was a very strange experience, my hands were shaking as I was flying down from Miami to Caracas.
“It was hard, but it helped me put the Colombian experience behind me. The point of going was to collect plants from Pic Bolivar, the highest mountain in Venezulua, but it also allowed me to exercise some ghosts.”
Of all the plants he has collected Mr Hart Dyke is most proud the Silver Princess Eucalyptus Caesia, which flowered for the first time in the UK at the castle last year and is about to flower again.
The garden attracted 10,000 visitors in its early stages in 2005 and 20,000 guests last year, thanks to the BBC2 documentary Save Lullingstone Castle, which followed his efforts.
After surviving several harsh frosts and a hosepipe ban, the completion of the garden should safeguard the castle for future generations of Hart Dykes.
Mr Hart Dyke said: “In years to come the World Garden will save the future of the castle.
“I did not think this when I was in Colombia, I just created the idea to save my sanity, but it has worked out this way.”
His progress during the last year can be seen in a new six-part documentary Return to Lullingstone Castle shown on Mondays on BBC2.
POSTED: 19/03/2007 16:11:02
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