When a garden is forgotten, how long can it survive?
There is a pile of limestone blocks in the middle of the Iraqi desert. Each half a meter across, with a square shape and one side decorated with enigmatic symbols, they’re unusual at first glance. They look like the remains of a giant pyramid.
This was not their purpose, which is why The Lost Gardens of Heligan are shrouded in mystery.
The Lost Gardens of Heligan History
An inscription is engraved into one side. It’s a message from an ancient Assyrian ruler who lived more than 2,700 years ago.
I am the king of the world. I caused a canal to be dug for a long distance from the river Hazur to the meadow of Nineveh. I built an aqueduct of white limestone over ravines. These waters flowed over it.
The only physical remains of this project are the ruins at Jerwan. The artificial channel was carved into the desert landscape with iron pickaxes and used to divert water from the mountains to the ancient city of Nineveh. The course of the river was diverted towards the kingdom’s capital city.
The piece de resistance, a water-bridge that was built to guide the river across a steep-sided valley, is what is left of the antique rubble. It was made from an estimated 443,520 blocks, each weighing over 500 lbs, and with soaring arches running along its length, bringing the grandeur of a Victorian viaduct to an otherwise empty desert in 690BC.
At Nineveh, Sennacherib was careful not to lose the watery possibilities that came from this feat of engineering. The goal was to use the new bounty to quench a belt of freshly planted orchards and grain fields above the city, along with vines, “every type of fruit”, “products of every mountain”, and olive trees. His grandson had a different idea.
The ruler of the Assyrian empire, Ashurbanipal, was an enthusiastic lion-hunter, and he was at his most extensive when it was at its most extensive, stretching from the snow-capped peaks of Iran’s Zagros mountains to the sparkling waters of the eastern Mediterranean. He enjoyed a spot of gardening when he wasn’t spearing large carnivores or conquering new lands.
The most impressive gardens the world had ever seen were created by Ashurbanipal during his 38 year reign.
The land around Nineveh was transformed from a barren desert into a lush oasis by an aqueduct.
In a relief sculpture from the era, Ashurbanipal and his wife are sitting on a high wooden sofa in the garden, sipping some refreshments. A large grape vine provides shade above them, and they’re nestled among date palms and pine trees.
As they lie there, the couple are being serenaded by musicians and fanned by servants, with Ashurbanipal’s fabulous long, braided beard fluttering gently in the breeze. It’s a garden paradise, except for the head of an enemy hanging from a tree. There was a hint that this was a different time.
There are trees in the gardens that are protected by heavily fortified walls. The lions are in the shade. Birds move from palm to palm. The parrots are looking at the scene above. There’s a mountain in the background with rows of plants arranged in terraces on its surface and a lake below. There are large trees growing on Corinthian columns.
The gardens at Nineveh vanished as soon as they appeared. When the ancient palace was excavated in 1854, the oasis was forgotten. The remains of the aqueduct at Jerwan were found by the archaeologist who unearthed them.
How can a garden that was so ambitious be forgotten? How long would it take for a garden to survive?
The yews were ancient.
Behind a grey limestone wall lies a small pocket of another world. There are hundreds of strange shapes in the landscape, including a giant umbrella, a towering top-hat, a judge’s wig, and herds of giant pyramids. There are balls, cylinders, cones, pedestals, and precarious tiered spires, each as tall as a house. The space is broken up by rows of emerald walls, each with their own cut-out arches, which form broken tunnels that stretch into the distance.
The backdrop is made from trees and hedges and is alien. Guillaume Beaumont is a Frenchman who designed it. He died hundreds of years ago.
When a storm hit the country in 1701, the gardens at Levens Hall were almost destroyed.
The gardens at Levens Hall were designed in the 1690s and were sculpted over the next two decades. They’re still there, and they’re not just a faint echo of them, but the real deal, containing many of the same yew, box and topiaries that were planted in this long-vanished era. The dodo had only been extinct for a decade, and piracy was considered to be in its “golden age”, when there were only 603 million people on the planet.
“How many successive generations have strolled pleasantly along those same long straight walks of gravel and sweeps of lawn?” pondered George Frederick Weston in a history of the gardens in 1869.
Weston was fascinated by the idea that he could see what others had seen hundreds of years before, and feel what they felt.
The article is part of a project. We are exploring what it takes to have a legacy that lasts for a long time. We would like to know how some things survive for millions of years, and if it is possible to leave a mark on the world that extends into the deep future.
It has not been easy. There have been battles. There have been changes in fashion. Financial hardship has been experienced. The gardens have held on through all this.
Money and fashion.
Money is a major factor in the gardens’ survival.
James Grahme was the keeper of the Privy purse and commissioned the gardens at Levens Hall.
In the 17th century, it was topiary. Many of the most extravagant houses in Europe, including the Palace of Versailles, had hedges and trees that looked like cartoon clouds.
By the early 1700s, everyone with wealth was chasing the next thing.
This next thing was the brainchild of the landscape architect, Capability Brown. His speciality was faking country scenes with rolling pastures and scatterings of trees, lakes and ruins.
Brown created 1,000 acres of parkland within a drystone wall at the Chatsworth estate. To achieve the effect, the entire oak trees were dug up.
Peonies can live for over a hundred years if they’re neglected or forgotten.
Hundreds and thousands of earlier gardens were swept away because people wanted to keep up with the Joneses. It’s hard to find gardens from before the 18th century in this country.
At Levens Hall, the topiary remained even though everyone else had torn it out. The Grahme family owned a lot of houses so there was little incentive to keep their small Cumbrian mansion up to date with the current trends. “It was a family backwater, they were doing fashionable things elsewhere, and it was a convenient place to hide poorer and relatively powerless female relations, such as aged aunts,” says Crowder.
A stroke of male misfortune meant that the female had continued on to the next generation. Grahme had three sons who could inherit the estate, but all of them died before Catherine could inherit it. The women in the family were fond of the quirky gardens and wouldn’t allow them to be changed.
It was always lived in by the females for a long time, and that’s what makes it feel like it survived. The last stroke of luck was a renewed appreciation of the old in the early 19th Century which meant that historic gardens were in-demand.
Pam Smith is a senior national consultant for gardens and parklands at the National Trust. “When I think about all the work we put into making decisions on how we assess, conserve and celebrate significant layers it can feel like quite a contrast with some of the more personal and ambitious decisions made by the historic families,” she says.
The landscape garden at Kedleston Hall was created in the 1720s. She says it was a large garden that went up the hill from the south of the hall. It must have been an impressive sight. The garden was removed when the next generation took over. Smith says the garden lasted 40 years.
Most of the original features of the gardens are still intact. The gardens were not great at the time. “But where all these others have changed completely, or some cases they are restorations, and where Levens has been gardened through the years, he has ridden through the years,” he says.
The gardens at Nineveh may have had tall, tower-like structures covered with plants.
Several-hundred-year-old trees are not unusual, though they are becoming rarer every day. It’s the fact that the ones at Levens have been carefully tended for centuries that makes them special. He says that the garden has been crafted yearly and that the topiary trees have had people’s hands across them.
The sheds and shrubs are happy.
How long can these contrived creations survive when they are abandoned?
When Tim Smit and John Willis first came across The Lost Gardens of Heligan in 1990, the land was occupied by a mass of spiky tendrils, each vying to claim any buildings or open space within their vicinity. There were trees growing from the glasshouse. There were great clumps of Ferns. Nature had reclaimed the garden from the local wildlife.
There was a garden that was three centuries old. Alasdair Moore, the head of gardens and estate, says that initially, it would have been all about the bare essentials. He says there is a productive garden that has grown over the years and is now two acres.
In the late 18th century, a local mining baron planted conifers and planned the landscaping of the formal gardens. His family added a walled garden, glasshouse, “melon yard”, and pineapple pit, which were ingenious ways of growing fruit in the chilly UK temperatures.
As the Lost Gardens of Heligan came into fashion, the Tremaynes added new features. This became difficult after World War One.
Moore says that the main shift is the massive social changes. The transition from agricultural wealth to industry meant that many families couldn’t afford country pads.
Today, parts of The Lost Gardens of Heligan look wild, but they are not.
There was also tragedy for Heligan. Moore says that the skills of the garden workforce after World War One had a profound effect on the atmosphere on the estate. The last squire talked a lot about ghosts, the place being full of ghosts and not really wanting to be here anymore.
Things continued to decline. The gardens were forgotten when the house was rented out. One day in 1990, a descendant of the Tremayne family stumbled across some hints of their former grandeur on the estate.
There were clouds of flowers. The plant had been used as a hedging plant. There were many trees that had grown up. Moore says it was “take a machete and try and find a way in”. All of the garden structures had rotted, except for the walls.
The Lost Gardens of Heligan were in complete chaos, but in some ways it was still intact. Moore said there was a kettle above the fireplace and a bucket full of coal that had coalesced when the team forced their way into the gardener’s office. It was almost like the estate team had just left and never came back.
There were other buried signs of what used to be. Many of the original features were still there, including the pathways and patches of camellias and rhododendrons that were first planted in the early 19th century.
“So the bones of the garden in terms of planting, large trees and shrubs were fine,” says Moore. He wonders if some of the more shallow-rooted vegetation only survived the 1976 heatwave and dry spell because the larger plants had grown up so much.
The volunteers were going to clear the plants that had self-seeded or spread too far. The Lost Gardens of Heligan is one of the region’s most popular attractions.
The Assyrian empire’s largest and most populous city was Nineveh, which was enclosed within 7 miles of walls.
Moore believes that the most important factor in a garden’s survival is the availability of people to look after them. “It’s all about people, not just to do the work, but people to care, and to be engaged.” He says that gardens are driven by individuals who feel the need to express themselves through a garden.
There are trees and flowers.
The jury is out on whether resurrected gardens count as old, but having ancient plants certainly helps.
The Amazon rainforest is an example. Evidence shows that when Christopher Columbus arrived in the Americas in 1492, the Amazon wasn’t as pristine as had been thought. It was shaped by a thriving indigenous community, whose cities were wiped out by European colonisers. The settlements were quickly swallowed up by the forest.
It’s been half a millennium since this transformation, but there are still hints of what once was. Scientists discovered that there are still higher densities of domesticated trees near where people lived all those centuries ago, by comparing surveys of plant diversity with maps of archaeological sites at ancient settlements.
This shows that gardens can have a legacy even after they are no longer recognisable. Garden plants are happy when they’re left alone.
In 2020, the head gardener at the estate became curious about the purpose of the long-derelict corner of the estate, which was built in the 19th century. The building was too dangerous to enter at the time because it was hanging off in shards.
After consulting experts and the public, Scott Jamieson discovered that it was originally used to house camellias and still contained 19 healthy plants. The oldest person to have lived there was from 1792. The discovery was compared to stumbling across a library of first-edition books.
We tend to think of trees as the most long-lived plants, but they’re not even close to holding the record. King’s Holly, a shrub with shiny, spiky foliage and deep pink flowers that’s native to a small patch of land in Africa, is thought to hold that honour. It reproduces asexually and one colony is 43,000 years old.
The world’s oldest potted individual is 247 years old, and some wild cycad plants are up to 1,000 years old.
If all else fails, some gardens live on in legends.
One of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon are believed to have existed for thousands of years. No one has ever found a trace of the city of Babylon, which was excavated as early as 1812 and has been studied ever since. They are the only ancient wonder that has been disputed. The mystery was described as “baffling”.
There is another way. The gardens at Nineveh and the ones at Babylon are the same according to the historian. The Gate of the Gods was the nickname of the two cities and they were often mixed up in ancient sources. The translations of Assyrian script in the 1920s were not good.
The ancient Greek historian Herodotus didn’t mention the hanging gardens even once during his visit to Babylon in the 5th century BC. Dalley points out that it would be surprising if he forgot to mention the city’s main attraction.
Dalley wrote up her theory in a book, The Mystery of the Hanging Garden at Babylon. It’s a plausible explanation for the total absence of archaeological evidence.
The gardens at Nineveh have survived just a few decades, but they may have achieved immortality under a different name.