The Clipper Adventurer
visits  

Abbey Gardens, Tresco Island
Isles of Scilly, England

I sit shrouded in pearly mists on a gunmetal gray sea. For a moment, the fog parts and I glimpse mounds of jagged rock. Then, dreamlike, the mists close and the island sinks into the obscure—the mist? the sea? I can’t tell. Perhaps these are the mists of Avalon, and I’ve just seen King Arthur’s island paradise. The next breach, however, reveals Tresco Island. It’s one of five inhabited islands of the 140 Isles of Scilly—say silly.

The Scillies are 28 miles west-south-west of England’s big toe. The Atlantic gales blast unimpeded all the way from America to slam these bits of English rock. The Gulf Stream flows over and up from the Gulf of Mexico to warm them. I, on the other hand, have come from Wales on the small cruise ship, the Clipper Adventurer. We’re on a voyage of discovery, in pursuit of the fine castles and gardens in the Celtic fringe of Ireland, Wales, England and Brittany.

That I might have seen Avalon, or at least an island drowned under England’s western sea turns out not to be all that farfetched. Clipper’s historian, John Harrison, told us last night of several islands drowned by the rise of sea level when the last glacier melted. In fact, off Scilly’s largest island, St Mary’s, stone walls can be seen under the sea.

Scilly’s mail boat is ferrying us from the Adventurer to Tresco where we’ll explore Abbey Gardens. We dock by a stone wall drenched in six-foot purple echiums. They tell a lusty tale. Escaped from the Gardens, the echiums romp about the island consorting wantonly with their fellow conspirators, the magenta-colored rhododendrons.

A donkey cart pulled by a tractor—no cars here—transports us from rural England into the tropics. Soon, we find silvery fronds of Canary Island date palms undulating high above ancient abbey walls. Succulent plants of lemon yellow, eggplant purple and the insides-of-lime-green cling to stone arches, the remains of a twelfth-century Benedictine Tavistock Abbey. The graves of long forgotten-monks are awash in hot pink ice plants and fiery red fuchsias. Abbey Gardens with over four and a half thousand tropical plants has been called "Kew with the roof off." .

Major Bryan Wright, Retired looks the part of a county gentleman in his corduroys, waxed waterproof and carved cane which does more pointing than propping. A cousin of the current owners, he retired to the gardens. Today, with dry wit and flora lore, he escorts us through the regions of Abbey Gardens. We travel from Mexico to Chile, past Upper Australia to Lower Australia, then through a forest of bamboo and tree ferns and on to the Mediterranean.

The Mexican agaves are so big they make me laugh and the puyas from Chile have weird torch-like flowers in turquoises and chartreuses so vivid they seem hand-painted. The South African Protea flowers, moreover, must surely be made of rare parrot feathers. The big-leafed Meryta tree is sacred to the Maori of New Zealand, explains the Major, "and are rather better than fireworks, I understand, if you put them in a fire." Fat and waxy Technicolor succulents are everywhere. The Major explains they are aeonium from the Mediterranean and "they proliferate like rabbits."

The warmth of the Gulf Stream gives the garden its plants, but it’s those Atlantic storms that give it its structure. To break those winds and protect the plants, California Monterey Pine and Cypress were planted in 1850. The Major tells of standing in the center of the garden during a fierce gale and not feeling it at all, because the center is so protected. "These trees ran the whole way round the garden until twelve years ago," he says, "then, we had a freak twister. It came straight across the top of that hill and in the space of an hour and a quarter 700 of those trees were lost. The shelter belt disappeared overnight." After this sinks in, he adds, "It has been replanted and should be back in about 30 years time."

The forceful character, Augustus Smith, was the one who first tamed these islands. Known to some as The Emperor and to others as accursed, he was a landed English gentleman and social reformer. Smith leased the Scillies from the Duchy of

Cornwall in 1834 to put his reforms into practice. He believed in creating opportunities, rewarding work and letting the weak go under. Putting his money behind his beliefs, he built a pier to handle larger boats, better homes and instituted compulsory education. Democracy, however, was not part of his scheme. Smith’s arbitrary and imperial style won him few friends among the Scillians. The islands, however, prospered as did the Gardens.

Abbey gardens—but not the rest of the Scillies—are still in the family. The current owners, the Robert A. Dorrien-Smith family, are lovers of sculpture as well as flora. Among their additions, David Wynne’s statue of Gaia stands out. Gaia, the earth-mother of Greek mythology is modeled after Wynne’s wife. She is carved from a tactile piece of South African marble lushly striated in gray and tawny tones. Quarried over a 100 years ago, it was found in a Liverpool warehouse and bought by the Beatle, George Harrison who gave it to Wynne saying, "do what you like with it." The Major says Prince Charles commissioned a copy of Gaia for his garden at Highgrove, "but his is of inferior marble; ours is rather better," he notes.

Mike Nelhams is a wizard of a horticulturalist and the Abbey’s head gardener. Mike’s a lively and friendly guy for a wizard and says he "has the best job in the world."

I’m not so sure. Consider, for example, the snow storm in 1987 followed by cold " on a scale never previously recorded." Mike says, "before our eyes the garden appeared to be falling into pieces as succulent exotics rotted, dripped and collapsed into oblivion." Then in 1990 the hurricane came. Years of plant hunting, collecting and resurrection followed each calamity.

The souls of all those deceased plants might hang around Valhalla. In mythology, Valhalla is the hall for the souls of slain heroes, but at the Abbey Gardens, it’s a museum of ship’s figureheads retrieved from wrecks. A beautiful woman, royal blue gown flowing behind her and next to her a soldier with cutlass drawn, lean out towards the sea. These figureheads acted as a ship’s beacon to lead the sailors—drunken perchance?—back to their home ship after a hard night in port.

Whether Valhalla or even Avalon ever existed, I can’t say, but I’m more inclined to think so after my visit to Tresco. I am sure this tropical garden built round the ruins of an abbey off the shores of England is enchanted. Well, enchanting certainly.