Sampson Tremayne bought Heligan from the Heligan family in 1569, the year Mary Queen of Scots fled to England and Elizabeth I was twelve years on the throne. The family was prosperous Cornish gentry, well-connected but never grand. William Tremayne, Sampson's descendant, began building Heligan House in 1603; it was substantially rebuilt in 1692 in William and Mary style, though it sits at the top of a hill overlooking the fishing village of Mevagissey a mile and a half below. The estate stretched in all directions, working farms tied to the great house, woodland and pasture sloping down to the sea. The Tremaynes were not absentee landlords. They lived here, generation after generation, marrying into other Cornish families, sending sons to Westminster and the army, burying their dead in the parish churches around. By the time the Reverend Henry Hawkins Tremayne inherited the estate in the late eighteenth century, the family had been at Heligan for over two hundred years.

Henry Hawkins Tremayne was an Anglican clergyman who took his stewardship of the land seriously. He laid out the gardens around Heligan House from the mid-eighteenth century onwards: shelter belts of trees, ornamental plantings, a series of pleasure grounds suitable for a country gentleman of taste. His son John Hearle Tremayne carried on the work. His grandson John, born in 1825, brought in the Victorian fashion for hybridising rhododendrons, planting Flora's Green with cultivars bred on the estate itself. The fourth generation, John Claude Lewis Tremayne, known as Jack, added the Italian garden in the early twentieth century. Across four lifetimes the Tremaynes built up an extraordinary garden complex: lakes fed by a ram pump that had been working since around 1900, productive flower and vegetable gardens, the only surviving pineapple pit in Europe (warmed by the slow heat of rotting manure), and a wild subtropical jungle of tree ferns down the slope. Twenty-two outdoor gardeners worked the estate in 1914.

When the First World War came, those twenty-two gardeners signed up. The records hold their names, scratched in chalk on the wall of the outdoor privy where they took a last collective break before leaving for France. Most never came home. The Tremayne family left the house and let it out to tenants who could not afford to maintain either the building or the immense gardens. By 1945 weeds and self-sown trees had begun to swallow the design. In the 1970s the house and outbuildings were divided into flats and sold off. The gardens, considered too far gone to save, were left to themselves. For nearly seventy years brambles spread over the lakes, ivy climbed the brick walls of the pineapple pit, the Italian garden became forest. From the road you would never have known there was anything underneath.

In 1990 a young John Willis, a Tremayne descendant, took Tim Smit and John Nelson on a walk through the overgrown estate. They found the names of the gardeners on the privy wall. They found a thunder box room, a tool room frozen at the moment its users left in 1914. They found the bones of a great Victorian garden under decades of growth. Smit, the record producer turned gardener, decided to restore it. The restoration project ran from 1992 onwards and was filmed by Channel 4 as a six-part series in 1996. The result, marketed as the Lost Gardens of Heligan, became one of the most popular garden attractions in the United Kingdom. The Mud Maid and the Giant's Head sculptures, made from rocks and living plants, appeared and now sleep half-buried in the woods, slowly mossing over. The Tremayne family no longer lives in the house, which remains divided into flats and is not open to the public. But the gardens they built, lost and found again, are once more the slow, patient work of gardeners. The ram pump, well over a century old now, still feeds the lakes.

Heligan sits in a sheltered fold of the south Cornish coast, where Atlantic mildness lets subtropical plants survive winters that further north would kill them. The rhododendrons the Tremaynes hybridised in the nineteenth century are now colossal, gnarled trunks supporting canopies of crimson flowers each spring. The camellias, some among the oldest in cultivation in Britain, bloom in February. The pineapple pit, restored to working order, still grows pineapples in Cornwall in defiance of every reasonable expectation. The gardens are a kind of slow argument: that careful work across generations can produce something stranger and richer than any one lifetime could plan. The Tremaynes did not invent that argument. They simply inherited it from their predecessors and added their work to it, then lost it, then watched it be picked up again. The willow tree garden, helygen, kept growing whether anyone was looking or not.