I have wanted to visit The Lost Gardens of Heligan for a while, so a trip down to Cornwall for a few days gave me the excuse!I had also arranged to meet Sam Corfield there… he is in charge of the fantastic live cams on the ‘Heligan Wild’ part of the website. I have watched the Tawny and Barn owl cams this season and have been inspired by the footage.
The award winning Lost Gardens of Heligan, asleep for more than seventy years, are the scene of the largest garden restoration project in Europe. In the spring of 1991, the Gardens of Heligan lay under a blanket of bramble, ivy, rampant laurel and fallen timber. An amazing team have worked miracles by restoring these gardens to their former glory. In the northern gardens are two and a half miles of footpaths, an Elizabethan mount, rockeries, summer houses, a crystal grotto, an Italian garden, a fine set of bee-boles, a wishing well and a superb collection of walled gardens. Amazingly, when the brambles were cleared, the team discovered that much of the original plant collection has survived, sometimes to record sizes….. the gunnera are simply stunning… I have never seen them so big!
There is so much to see at The Lost Gardens of Heligan, that a day is only just enough… check out the wesbite for more info and images… click these images from the website, to take a look….
I met up with Sam and I was really pleased to learn more bout how he achieves the amazing images he has achieved… particularly in the Tawny box which really captured my imagination. For those who have not seen it, here is a clip of the kind of footage that Sam and the team managed to achieve… for me it was the most memorable cam I found online this year…. and I have looked at a lot!
Sam has taken down the box and made a new one with some adaptations… he was kind enough to show me it in his great workshop…..
I was suitably inspired and it has given me lots of ideas for new cams and possibilities for my set ups and I can’t wait to get going on all the ideas I have buzzing in my head…. next season hopefully you will be seeing some great new views and angles in my nest box cams! A big thanks to Sam for giving up some time to talk to me. Sam is also a talented wildlife cameraman…. some of his footage appeared on BBC2’s Heligan programme that was on this week. It can be seen on iPlayer HERE if you missed it and was filmed and produced by Charlie Hamilton James and his wife, Philipa Forrester.
I would love to go back to Heligan in the Spring… to see it just bursting into life. It is the kind of place you would want to visit in all 4 seasons and I would recommend you visit if you are in that part of the country.
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