Meet Nicola Bradley, Head Gardener at The Lost Gardens of Heligan

To celebrate the launch of our ‘Meet The Gardeners’ campaign we sat down for a chat with Nicola Bradley to discuss everything Heligan! Nicola shared with us her favourite areas of the garden, the plants she’s had the most success with, some challenges she’s currently facing, and her top gardening tips…

This interview will take you on a journey behind the scenes at The Lost Gardens of Heligan, paint a picture of Nicola herself and give you a real insight into her role as Head Gardener.

Nicola joined the team at Heligan in 2006 after a successful career in textile design, and says, “I still love making and creating, and to me gardening is absolutely another way of doing this”.

This interview is full of great information and positivity. So, grab a cuppa, relax in a comfy chair and enjoy Nicola’s interview in full below…

What do you love most about your role as Head Gardener?

I feel very lucky to be part of the garden team at The Lost Gardens of Heligan, I work with the most dedicated and passionate group of gardeners and can honestly say that I love working with my colleagues. The people at Heligan make the place really special.

I also love the fact that I get to come to work in such an amazing place each day. One of my morning jobs is to carry out garden checks just to make sure all is safe and well before we open to visitors. I savor this time, it’s so peaceful and I get to see the garden in all weathers at all times of year, seeing all the subtle changes from day to day and the truly dramatic changes from month to month. I never stop thinking how lucky I am to be a part of that, it’s such a privilege!

What are the must-see areas of the garden at Heligan, and why?

There are so many beautiful spots in the garden depending on the time of day and the season too. It’s very difficult to choose.

The Jungle is a must see part of the garden. When you’re down in the middle of this exotic valley garden, no matter what time of year it really can feel like you’re in another world. The planting certainly has the ‘wow’ factor, including lots of old specimen trees, bamboos and a huge range of impressive architectural plants alongside our iconic tree ferns. The warm microclimate in this part of the garden allows us to grow plants that you wouldn’t be able to in other parts of the country, giving it a wonderfully exotic feel. Both children and adults love to explore this area of the garden, not least crossing over the Jungle on the rope bridge!

For a complete contrast I would also say not to miss the productive gardens, and particularly the Flower Garden, especially in the height of summer when it is in its full glory. The cut flowers grown here would have provided the main house with beautiful floral displays 150 years ago. The glasshouses, old walls and neatly tended beds give a sense of the orderly regimentation of a traditional walled garden. From early summer onwards it becomes a beautiful space with a succession of traditional cut flowers, including the lovely scent of sweet peas alongside antirrhinums, cosmos, cornflowers, dahlias and zinnias to name just a few.

The Melon Yard is the very heart of the productive gardens and here you’ll find the Potting Shed, still used by our gardeners today as it would have been so many years ago. The Potting Shed is a very special space, most of our visitors who wander in and spend a few moments there experience a sense of its history and all the gardeners that have gone before us. Almost everyone, no matter whether they are 30 years old or 80 years old, get very nostalgic and say it reminds them of their grandparents!

A must see for the spring is our historic Rhododendron collection. Most of our visitors have never seen Rhododendron plants of such an age and size as these very impressive specimens. The collection has been planted throughout the garden, so the beautiful spring flowers can be seen in both the Jungle and the ornamental gardens on a grand scale.

As well as the obvious beauty of the flowering Rhododendrons in spring, I think they offer a more subtle beauty all year round through their impressive tangle of trunks and stems. Some of the oldest plants are over 160 years old and they have grown into such characterful, twisted individuals! It would be easy to walk past the large banks of plants on Floras Green when they are not in flower and think there is nothing special to see. I love taking people along the paths that run behind them, where you can wander up close beside this wonderful mass of stems. They look particularly good after a rain shower, the stems are a beautiful mix of rich reds and browns, which intensify when wet. When the Rhododendrons drop their blooms they create beautiful carpets of pink, red and white flowers around the base of the plants. Again, the tangle of stems growing up out of these carpets of colour is a beautiful sight to see.

What rare/ unexpected finds can we see in your garden?

We grow over 500 varieties of heritage vegetables, fruits, flowers and herbs in our productive gardens. It’s great to see a resurgence of interest in these older varieties and hopefully over the last 30 years of growing and championing them here at Heligan, we’ve gone some way to help influence that resurgence.

Some of the varieties we grow are no longer commercially available, or are difficult or expensive to source, so where we can we save seed of this precious stock to help preserve it for the future. About half of the peas and beans we grow are from the seed we save each year. Victorian gardeners had so many more varieties to choose from than today’s gardeners. Many of these varieties have disappeared forever, so it’s important to keep growing as many of those that remain as we can. This is not least because with our changing climate, some of these old varieties may have characteristics that will help provide more successful crops for the future.

Victorian gardeners also just loved to grow an oddity! So, in honour of them we still grow Scorzonera (a long black root crop which is a nightmare to dig up!) Oca de Peru and Mashua (both tuberous crops) to name just a few. Our chefs love experimenting with some of our more unusual crops for their Lost Supper Nights.

What plants have you had the most success with and why?

Our Tree Ferns (Dicksonia antarctica) thrive at Heligan and are obviously very happy in their sheltered surroundings. We are lucky and don’t need to provide them with any additional protection through the winter, and although temperatures can drop below freezing in all areas of the garden including the Jungle valley, it is only very rarely we have a hard frost lasting for any length of time. Thankfully, our well-established plants seem to cope ok with this occasional glitch in our usually milder climate, always recovering the following summer with new healthy growth. There are many older tree ferns, originally planted back in the late 1800’s which are truly magnificent specimens. A walk down Treseder Steps, a path in the Jungle lined with some mighty examples, allows our visitors to experience the full glory of these beautiful architectural plants.

What are your biggest challenges in the garden at Heligan? How do you try to overcome them?

The weather feels like it’s becoming more of a challenge in recent years, with more extreme weather patterns throughout the seasons. I’ve always been used to plenty of rain during my years of gardening in Cornwall and this has always helped the garden flourish. But the high winds and torrential downpours we now experience through the winter months have had a significant impact on many of our plants and the garden infrastructure. Throughout the recent storms we’ve lost some important trees, losing these older trees makes a real change to our surroundings, often leaving other nearby trees exposed and vulnerable to future bad weather. Strengthening our natural shelterbelts around the garden has become a priority for this reason.

Going from one extreme to the other, we have in recent years also struggled with drought throughout the summer months. We may no longer be able to depend on the steady rainfall all year round in Cornwall. In these prolonged periods of dry weather you can see the stress in many of our plants, including some of the important historical plant collections.

Improving soil moisture retention and applying mulches can help in the short term. Looking further ahead, finding ways to save the excess of water we get in the winter and storing it for the drier summer months would seem to make sense. This is a huge challenge that we don’t have the answer to yet, but it’s certainly something we have at the very front of our minds.

What top 3 tips can you share with gardeners to help them in their own gardens?

Where possible, it’s good to be a little less tidy and give the wildlife in our gardens a bit of a helping hand. At home I have put lots of leaves, hedge clippings and some thick woody branches under some of my larger shrubs. Since providing this extra habitat space I now regularly see 2 or 3 hedgehogs out in my garden at night. I also don’t cut back the old growth in my vegetable patch until I want to start sowing again in the spring, the old hollow broad bean and sweetcorn stems provide great habitat for insects, the birds love picking through the sunflower seed heads and I’ve found several fat toads sheltering under the old woody chard plants. Hopefully they are all helping to eat my slugs!

In the vegetable plot I would recommend successional sowing, especially with quick growing crops such as salads, radish, baby beetroots, rocket and spinach. It’s easy to get carried away and sow far too much initially, if you sow a small patch and then sow again at two-to-three-week intervals throughout the season, you’ll avoid ending up with big gluts of the same thing ready all at once. This way when you finish eating your first sowing, the second sowing should hopefully be just perfect and ready to eat and so on…

Lots of people with small gardens think they don’t have space to grow a fruit tree. Training fruit trees as single cordons allows you to grow a variety of fruits in very small spaces. Apples, pears, red and white currants and gooseberries are all easily grown as cordons, you can train them up walls or along posts and wires, so they are perfect to make the most of any spare vertical space you might have. When grown in this way they are easy to harvest too as the fruit is within easy reach. You can also train apples and pears as ‘step overs’, these are effectively cordons grown horizontally which look great along the edges of paths or beds. They are a great alternative to low hedging. Training fruit trees is much simpler than it looks, just remember you need to start with a one year old plant so you can start training it before it begins to create its own natural shape. There are lots of easy to follow online tutorials that will help show you how to do this. Fruit trees definitely earn their space alongside any ornamental plants, and you really can grow a fruit tree in almost any space!

What is the most common mistake made by gardeners?

People quite often buy a plant because they love it, but in their excitement they often forget to check the conditions the plant may need and whether their garden is a suitable place for it. It’s so disappointing when a plant fails to thrive. We get asked by visitors why one of their best loved plants isn’t doing very well, and often after a bit of questioning it sounds like the plant is indeed in the wrong place.

Sometimes plants will completely surprise us and grow in places that they really shouldn’t, so it can be worth pushing a plant’s boundaries. But if you are about to make an expensive purchase, I would want to give that plant its best possible chance of doing well.

Observing your garden closely can help you see what conditions it will provide, how does the sun travel around your garden, where are the deep shady spots, does an area always stay dry due to an overhanging roof? These kinds of questions will help you find the right space for a plant. Buy a soil testing kit too, it’s interesting and helpful to see what type of soil you have. Research before buying to see what plants should work well in your space. Also look at healthy, happy plants you admire nearby or in a neighbour’s garden, chances are it might grow well in your garden too!

If you were only allowed 3 gardening tools, which would you choose?

I would choose a dandelion weeder, a dutch push hoe and a hand trowel.

The dandelion weeder is a great tool for removing long, deep rooted perennial weeds. There is something so very satisfying about easing out a weed and realising you have the whole root perfectly removed in one go… it’s the simple pleasures in life that count!

The dutch hoe is an essential tool in the kitchen garden to keep the annual weeds at bay, the trick with hoeing is to do it early when the weeds are still very small, almost before you can even see them! It’s a quick job then and the weeds burn off quickly on a dry, sunny or windy day. Make sure to keep your hoe well sharpened and it will slice through the tops of your weeds without having to push down into the soil.

A hand trowel is a very versatile little tool that can be used for many different tasks, including planting, creating seed drills, weeding and gently aerating the soil as you work. There are lots of jobs that I can do armed only with a hand trowel!

If you had one wish for the future of your garden, what would it be?

I hope the garden continues to thrive and there are still gardeners here to look after it in the next 100 years. We can’t know what the future holds, but I would hope that people will still appreciate the importance of nature and how important it is for us as human beings to be connected to the soil and the plants that grow in it. How we do that may change, but I hope our passion for it remains just as strong.

If you weren’t a gardener, what other profession would you love to pursue?

I have already had my other career before I retrained in horticulture over 20 years ago. I originally studied for a degree in Printed Textiles and worked as a freelance designer creating interior fabric collections for lots of different clients. I still love making and creating, and to me gardening is absolutely another way of doing this. I have met lots of very creative people in the world of horticulture, so I’m not the only one who thinks that!

Meet The Gardeners

As part of our 30 Years celebrations, we’ll be introducing you to the horticultural masterminds behind The Great Gardens of Cornwall over the next 14 weeks. We’ll be sharing our Meet The Gardeners profiles on social media, so if you’re not already following us on Facebook or Instagram – now is a great time to start.

We hope you enjoy this opportunity to get to know the greatest gardeners in Cornwall!