Qualla: Trebah

Trebah: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit greenacre8, CC BY 2.0. At the foot of the garden, half-buried in the shingle, a memorial slab reads: "To the officers and men of the U.S. 29th Infantry Division, who embarked from Trebah in June 1944 for the D-Day assault on Omaha Beach. We will remember them." Above it, a 26-acre ravine drops 200 feet to the Helford River through tree ferns and giant gunnera, leaves the size of dining-room tables, hydrangeas glowing blue beneath rhododendron canopies. It is one of the strangest juxtapositions in the English landscape. A sub-tropical pleasure garden, planted with Quaker precision, that also happened to be the launching ramp for some of the bloodiest hours of the twentieth century.

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Image: greenacre8 | CC BY 2.0

Trebah: A Quaker's Garden

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit EvaK, CC BY-SA 2.5. Trebah was acquired in 1831 by the Fox family, the same Falmouth Quakers who built neighbouring Glendurgan. The first true gardener here was Charles Fox, a Quaker polymath who paid meticulous attention to the exact position of every tree, walking the ravine with sight-lines and s...

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Image: EvaK | CC BY-SA 2.5

Trebah: Polgwidden Beach, June 1944

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rod Allday, CC BY-SA 2.0. By 1943 the United States Army's 29th Infantry Division had taken over the lower garden. The lawns were buried under concrete. Embarkation hards were laid through the ravine down to Polgwidden, the small private beach below. In early June 1944 around 7,500 American soldiers loade...

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Image: Rod Allday | CC BY-SA 2.0

Trebah: Major Hibbert's Twenty-Four Years

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Martin Bodman, CC BY-SA 2.0. In 1981, on their 64th birthday, Tony Hibbert and his wife Eira bought Trebah as a retirement home. The garden had been derelict for four decades. They were persuaded to spend the first three years of retirement restoring it. Major Hibbert, a former British Army officer, agreed r...

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Image: Martin Bodman | CC BY-SA 2.0

Trebah: What Grows Now

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Foodista, CC BY 2.0. Walk down the path today and the ravine unfolds in layers. Rhododendron hedges, magenta in spring, give way to the Bamboo Garden, then to the Gunnera jungle around the small stream, then to a clear blue tunnel of hydrangeas the Hibberts called the Hydrangea Valley. Tree ferns lea...

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Image: Foodista | CC BY 2.0