Cornwall Glorious Gardens from Above

Britain has some of the finest gardens anywhere in the world.

For me it's about getting in amongst the wonderful plants that flourish

'in this country and sharing the passion of the people who tend them.'

However there is another way to enjoy a garden.

And that's to get up above it.

I love ballooning

because you can get to see the world below in a whole new light.

From up here you get a real sense of how the garden

sits in the landscape, how the terrain and the climate

has shaped it and I want you to share that experience with me.

I'm heading for a part of the UK that's always had a very

special place in my heart.

And I'm not alone in loving this particular landscape.

In a national poll to find the best views in Britain,

this county easily came out on top.

Today, I'm taking to the skies above Cornwall.

In the far South West of Great Britain, Cornwall sticks

out like a finger into the Atlantic Ocean.

In the North of the county,

high exposed granite, pasture land

and arable areas.

But with 400 miles of coastline, Cornwall is perhaps

best-loved for its caves, its coves and its wonderful sandy beaches.

The beauty and bounty of Cornwall has always drawn people to the county.

Artists visit for the fabulous light.

Chefs for the mouth-watering seafood.

And me? I'm just after one thing.

I'm here to see its fantastic gardens.

And I'm taking to the air to get a whole new view of glorious Cornwall.

Today I'm visiting two gardens that flourish in the unique

conditions found in Cornwall.

It's a county where plants appear to have come from a lost world.

It just feels like going back to being a dinosaur.

Where I have to take gardening to an exciting level.

You're a star. Well done.

And where everyone pitches in to get the job done with

a sense of Cornish pride.

Cornish, innit? Handsome.

From up here you can see how varied the landscape of Cornwall is.

You've got fertile valleys, these beautiful patchwork of fields,

surrounded by hedges

and the slightly undulating softness that makes Cornwall Cornwall.

I'm going to be setting down close to one of my favourite

gardens in the UK.

Trebah covers 26 acres and it's the cream of Cornwall.

It's chock full of plants that get my pulse racing.

Trebah sits on the North bank of the Helford River

and it always reminds me of having a paint-pot of plants

and I just want to pour it down the valley to the sea.

There's that sense of adventure, foaming trees,

spectacular plantings. For me, my favourite Cornish valley garden.

Trebah is world famous for the fabulous exotic plants that

thrive here, thanks to the unique Cornish climate.

The Gulf Stream brings warm wet weather across the ocean from

the Caribbean, and Cornwall is one of the sunniest counties in the UK.

Put those two things together and the result is a garden paradise.

Trebah, the most magical Cornish sub-tropical valley that I know.

Full of froth and excitement and a sense of adventure.

It's a combination of the sea, the pond, the flowing blue

hydrangeas up the valley to that most amazing gunnera plantation.

I've never been here and left without being wildly excited

and it is the magic of the place that makes it Trebah.

The garden was created in the late 1830s by a man called

Charles Fox, who came from a wealthy local shipping family.

He was an amateur scientist with a huge passion for exotic trees and plants.

The current Head Gardener, Darren Dickey, has lived in Cornwall

since he was a child.

He's been working here at Trebah for over 20 years

and has been in charge since 2002.

I'm meeting him at the top of the garden where he's adding

a new exotic specimen to Trebah's collection.

-Hi.

-Hi, Christine.

-Nice to meet you, Darren.

-Nice to meet you.

-So what are you doing here?

-We're actually going for a new introduction for Trebah.

This is a Schefflera. We've always tried to do something a little

bit different and this is a sort of a new exotic addition to the garden.

-Can I give you a hand planting it then?

-Of course you can, yeah.

Oh, look at this.

Fantastic, isn't it?

Oh, this is nice, isn't it, yes. Schefflera alpina.

Scheffleras are also known as umbrella plants

and this one comes from South East Asia.

Let's dig this hole. It's lovely soil.

I mean, God, you could almost sprinkle it on your cornflakes.

It's lovely, and look, I mean just ideal.

But what makes Trebah so special for you?

For me, you've obviously got the sort of natural micro-climate of the garden.

It's very close to the Helford Estuary, the sea,

so you've obviously got the benefit of the Gulf Stream.

Also we have very mild winters and so you get this fantastic

-sort of lush growth, the season goes on for longer.

-Yeah.

And the other great thing we have, very fortunately, we have lovely sort of water features

leading all the way down through and then the ultimate water

feature with the beach at the bottom of the garden. So we have our

own private beach where people can come and enjoy, spend the day, have

an ice cream and enjoy the beautiful clear waters of the Helford.

'But there's no chance of a sit-down and a rest for me.

'Not when there's a plant to get in.'

..And preferably obviously if you can loosen

the soil up below so that it's got a chance to establish.

Pickaxe, dynamite?

-Yeah.

-What do you fancy?

Well it's funny, there's lovely stories about years ago

that in the Cornish gardens, one way of getting

rid of stumps in the garden, they used to set dynamite on them.

-Blow 'em out.

-And blow them out.

Yeah, aye, I know. Such a shame about health and safety these days, isn't it?

Because you imagine, "boom", out comes a tree trunk,

as a visitor goes by.

-Taken away all the fun.

-Yeah.

-Do you want to give that a go?

-Yeah, let's see where we are.

-That's looking pretty good.

-Yeah.

When Charles Fox was stocking up his back garden in Victorian times,

he brought exotic plants

and shrubs like these back from abroad in his family's ships.

There, that looks all right. This is one, I want to see some other new introductions.

Today some of Charles Fox's original trees still tower over the garden.

And what I want to know, Darren is,

how on earth did he know where to put these fantastic trees?

You know, he was putting in little things like that.

It was interesting. There's a story that goes that he would

create scaffold towers around the garden to the eventual height

so that he could then get the scaffold towers positioned

around the garden, so that he knew just whether they would block

the view down through the valley, how they'd fit into the landscape.

So once the tower was obviously positioned,

he'd send the sort of young lad up, the youngest of the team probably,

clambering to the top with a little flag and they'd wave the flag and

he'd stand up at the house, "To the left a bit, right a bit."

Those gardener's boys might not have enjoyed being sent up scaffolding

to see the garden from up high, but I think seeing Trebah from above

is a fantastic way to appreciate how the garden nestles in to its valley.

There are four miles of footpaths winding down through the garden.

Streams and cascades fill the air with the sound of falling water.

The bamboos whisper.

And the wind swirls through the leaves of the tree ferns

and grasses.

Meanwhile the valley meanders 80 metres from its top

down to the beach below.

The garden leads down on to the Helford River,

which opens into an estuary and flows out to the sea.

Trebah first opened to the public in 1987.

Since then one of the main draws of the 100,000 annual

visitors is the wonderful Hydrangea Valley.

In the wild, hydrangeas are found in Asia and in North and South America.

The hydrangeas at Trebah are native to China and Japan.

These flowers are mainly a glorious blue

because the soil here is acidic.

If the soil's alkaline, hydrangeas produce pink flowers.

Some hydrangeas thrive in shade and they love rain and hate frost.

No wonder they do so well here.

But if you think the hydrangeas are outsized just wait

until you see another plant that the garden is famous for.

It's a monster.

This is the Gunnera Passage, lined with towering plants

that are also known as Giant Brazilian Rhubarb.

They always bring out the kid in me.

I mean it's just awesome.

It's twice my height and the leaves are twice as big as I am.

So how the heck, you know, how, how do you look after it?

It's one of those plants that pretty much looks after itself,

but from time to time we have to get in here, this time

of year, in the summer, and just trim off some of the leaves as they

collapse down over. and some of the dead leaves, just to tidy it up.

But once we get through into October and it all starts to

die back, we'll get in there and literally take the whole lot down.

So this just erupts in the spring, producing these fantastic flowers.

And then just withers away at the back end.

But look, look at it.

I mean, frothy, man, frothy. I want to be a dinosaur.

Because it just feels like going back to being a dinosaur.

I mean it is a truly magnificent plant.

Come on, let's go and do a bit, let's sort it out.

The leaves of gunnera can grow up to two and a half metres wide.

-It's a bit Indiana Jones in here.

-Great.

We're just going to chop them off with a machete, just tidy them up.

We'll just use them just as a little sort of bit of a cover...

-Machete?

-..for the shoots.

Yeah it's a bit brutal looking,

but always good fun for the gardeners.

-So, if you want to hold on to the step.

-Yeah, OK.

-I'm just going to take it off down here.

-OK.

Like so.

So, do you want to have a go at chopping that one?

Yeah. Whoa! You see, this is the exciting bit.

Way-hay! Look at that. Watch your legs.

Oh, chop that bit off, make it tidy.

Right. How many more can we do? I'm on a roll.

Come on, let's have this one off.

Hang on, let's... There we go.

Right here.

I think it's a fantastic job. Gunnera chopper-er.

Believe it or not,

by next year these huge plants will have grown right back again.

Absolutely amazing to be able to chop it from underneath.

-Thanks so much. Come on.

-Well, thank you for your help.

Let's have a wander.

The Gunnera Valley at Trebah might look like a crazy jungle,

but it's as carefully cultivated as the rest of the garden.

The balmy Cornish climate

and fantastic soil make for great growing conditions.

But you do have to keep on top of the pruning

and weeding or things can get quickly get out of hand.

Just up the coast from Trebah, is the ancient harbour of Penryn.

On the edge of the town there's an area of fields

and woodlands that should be great for everyone to enjoy.

But over the years, it's become unloved,

overgrown and a bit of a dumping ground.

A group of locals are giving up their free time to tidy this community space.

We've got lots of jobs to do today.

Pip Carlton-Barnes is the driving force behind the plans to

transform the wilderness into a green wonderland.

The ultimate aim is to keep it clean,

usable and a lovely place for anyone to come and visit.

'Who wouldn't want to walk out their front door and listen to the'

birds, have a game of football with the kids and just generally relax?

Today, Pip and her team are going to be battling the brambles

and clearing the corner of the woodland and river.

By the end of today, if we can have this area clear, it's a

usable space, then I think that will be a day's work well done, really.

Some of the volunteers remember playing around here as youngsters.

It used to be full of children playing, messing around,

just being children basically and having lots and lots of fun,

and that's what we want for everybody else in this community.

And getting stuck into the clean-up today are Barnaby

and his dad.

I come down with my friends.

We build dens. We play hide and seek.

'If we clear it up more, maybe more people could come and visit'

and see what the wildlife is here.

The woods are not just a place to learn about nature.

Underneath a layer of leaves,

they're uncovering the town's history.

I think that's tile mosaic that.

I reckon that's the bottom part of a swimming pool or a paddling pool

that used to be here.

-Have I done good, have I?

-I think you've done really good, mate. You've done a super job, mate.

Whatever it turns out to be,

someone once cared enough about the woods to build this here.

With luck, in years to come, the locals will still appreciate

this place just as much.

It's a big project.

It's not going to happen overnight and we all appreciate that.

We all work, we all give up our time, so, it's a long project.

But we will get there. We will, we're all determined.

It's fantastic what the gang has achieved in just one day.

I don't think it'll be long before the sound of kids having fun

rings around these fields once again.

Imagine what it would be like to grow up with

Trebah as your own personal playground.

That's Marcus' story.

When he was a child, his father was the head gardener here.

But unlike today, the garden wasn't open to the public back then.

It was a private garden, it was a private house.

So consequently, it was a secret that was shared by very few people.

I was one of them.

In the eyes of a seven-year-old boy it was paradise

and day after day I would entertain myself by running around wildly,

looking at the wildlife and sitting on the beach throwing stones.

Doesn't get better when you're seven.

Marcus left Cornwall when he grew up but returned after retiring.

He decided to seek out the place he remembered from childhood

and now works here one day a week as a volunteer gardener

There may be a better place in the world somewhere,

but if there is, I've never been to it.

-Hi, Marcus.

-Hello, Christine.

-Nice to meet you.

-Nice to meet you, too.

So describe the atmosphere,

paint a picture of a seven-year-old racing around Trebah.

Well, I can only sort of describe it as unfettered fun

because if you imagine the mind of a seven-year-old,

all of this can be anything you want at any time.

And what was it to you?

I was a hiding place, it was a fortress, it was a castle,

it was all sorts of things.

What about as an adult?

As an adult, I obviously have chosen to volunteer here and what the

garden gives to me now is not only an opportunity to relive those

memories of childhood, but also to do something practical towards it.

The time that I spent actually growing up here,

has obviously imprinted my heart with Trebah

and so consequently it is a joy to actually put something back.

And what do you actually do as a volunteer?

I actually enjoy speaking with people, the visitors to Trebah,

because I'm always absolutely amazed to hear their comments.

Everybody that you speak to just can't believe anything about it.

It's all too lovely and it's just spectacular to actually

see them as they enjoy the garden.

If you were to describe it and the atmosphere,

what would you say about this garden?

I would say that this view down the valley takes some

beating in comparison to anything else the world has to offer.

If you can imagine, the shape of the valley lends itself perfectly

to noise and it sort of surrounds you.

It's a bit like when you hear on the television of being

-in the jungle, where you've got sounds all around you.

-Yes.

It's that sort of experience. It's entirely encapsulating.

I think you're a remarkably lucky chap, you know.

Well, I must say that I have to agree with you on that.

It was a childhood unlike many others, I must say.

Mm, quite magical. I think we'd best get some gardening done.

I think so too.

At the very end of Trebah Gardens, Marcus' beloved valley opens

out into the Helford River, the estuary and the sea.

It's a peaceful place down here today with just the lapping of the

river and the calls of the sea birds disturbing the tranquillity.

But 70 years ago, the beach echoed to a very different soundtrack.

Although it's 200 miles from the coast to Normandy,

in 1944 Trebah played its part in the events of D-Day.

Sylvia was a just a child when the Yanks came to town.

When the troops came through the village,

the noise was the main thing, kept coming through in the daytime

and several ladies, they took out cups of tea to the sentries

that were standing by the roadside and they were told to go back

indoors and not have anything to do with any of the troops at all.

In May 1943, more than 7,000

soldiers from the 29th US Infantry Division arrived in Cornwall

to prepare for Operation Overlord, the invasion of France.

The cove at Trebah had been carefully

chosen for the embarkation.

The river bed drops sharply away, just off the beach,

meaning boats can get close in.

The American troops set about widening

the road down to the shore, laying down hard standing,

and building jetties in readiness for leaving for France.

All under Sylvia's curious eyes.

They were building a pier at Trebah Beach and one day we were

sitting, we were playing on the beach, and suddenly these aeroplanes

swooped up the river and started, we thought they were fireworks,

but apparently they were shooting at the men that were building the pier.

We thought it was very exciting and we were most upset

when our parents came and shouted for us to come indoors.

The troops spent a year preparing the site

and training for D-Day, and Sylvia

and her friends found themselves with a new playground to explore.

Well, the soldiers, they did camp at Bosveal crossroads,

under the trees, and so children used to go

and wander round the camps and the soldiers were very kind.

They would give us chewing gum and sweets and for us girls, it sounds

funny, but they would give us thick wool and knitting needles because

we didn't have wool and knitting needles during the war. So trying

to learn to knit when you were a child, it was wonderful to have wool. They were very kind.

But on the first of June 1944,

as swiftly as they'd arrived, the soldiers were gone.

Suddenly, one day, one morning, we woke up and there was nothing,

nothing at all on the river.

It was as quiet as a millpond, no sound.

It was very eerie. Just as if you had imagined it.

The men of the 29th Infantry Division joined

the assault on Omaha Beach in Normandy.

By the end of D-Day, the 6th June,

over 2,500 Americans lay dead on that beach alone.

There's now a memorial on the shore at Trebah to the men who

gave their lives that day.

And Sylvia will never forget how a peaceful stretch of Cornish

river played such an important part in British history.

We thought it would never happen down here because we

were so far away from France down here.

We thought it was just a practice run.

We had no idea that it was the real thing, until afterwards.

20 miles from Trebah as the balloon flies,

there's another connection to Normandy here in Cornwall.

After the Norman conquest in 1066, the island of St Michael's Mount

was given to the French monastery of Mont Saint-Michel.

The monks built a priory on top and for centuries,

it was a place of pilgrimage.

The monks are long gone

but St Michael's Mount is still a thriving island community.

Now the 30 permanent residents welcome over

a quarter of a million visitors a year.

Most of them come to see the fairy-tale castle,

but then discover the wonderful gardens.

Exotic species flourish here even though they're clinging to

a piece of granite, lashed by Atlantic winds.

Assistant head gardener Darren Little has long called this

corner of Cornwall home.

So you're a local lad, Darren, but what brought you to the Mount?

My parents lived on the island, so I was sort of born

and brought up on the island from a very young age.

-What was it like as a youngster?

-Brilliant really.

I mean you've got all the sea around you, you've got a lot of activities.

You've got your canoeing, your kayaking, your sailing,

your swimming, your fishing, and I've got young children

and they're sort of following in my footsteps

if you like and sort of doing what I used to do as a child over here.

After growing up on the Mount, and working here since 2000,

Darren knows the gardens better than anyone.

The island itself is made up of three sort of main areas.

We've got the northern side of the island, which is

all your sort of heavier evergreen shrub planting.

We've got the southeastern side of the island which

we call our sub-tropical gardens.

Then we've got the western side of the island which is more

sort of barren cliff faces

and rocky outcrops with coastal paths running through.

So what are the challenges?

It is sort of gardening on the edge.

We're open to the elements with the salt spray

coming up onto the gardens.

We work with weather conditions, so if it's a howling northerly

wind, we can work on the southern side of the island.

If we've got extreme temperatures in the gardens because they get

very hot we can work in the shade on the northern side of the island.

We try and push our boundaries

and grow things that other people can't grow within the gardens.

Today, Darren and his team are going to be putting in some plants

which are particularly suited to these coastal conditions.

Some wonderful succulents.

Succulents form a huge group of plants.

They can be big like these agaves

or ground-hugging like these echeverias.

They do best in hot,

dry conditions and conserve water in their thick fleshy leaves or stems.

Many don't need much soil to grow and will thrive in cracks and crevices.

If you don't have the right conditions to grow them outside,

they also make great house plants.

Looking at St Michael's Mount,

you'd think the succulents have sprung up naturally.

In fact, they've been carefully planned

and planted as the rest of the castle gardens.

But some of these cliffs are over 25 metres high.

Every couple of months Darren

and his team need to check for loose rocks and to plant up new specimens.

When I offered to help, I knew I'd have to be ready for anything.

It's not too far, look.

I think you'll be fine once you get over the edge.

-Give it a go.

-Right, let's go.

Just watch the...

'Ooh, the things gardeners have to do to make a garden grow.'

-So, watch how you're going, OK? Are you happy?

-Yeah.

Let some tension come on to that rope and you'll feel nice and secure then.

Keep going, keep going.

So just walk down the cliff face?

Right, just walk down the cliff face now. Now you're safe.

You're a star, well done.

This might seem crazy,

but it's all part of the great master plan for the Mount.

The gardens are what we call grown vertical.

We've always concentrated on the gardens itself

but we've got all these unique cliff faces.

But you could have millions of plants.

We could and we probably will.

And it'd be fascinating to come back in say ten years' time,

to just see how many different species you've got growing.

Yes, well even in five years' time, hopefully, we'll just...

Well quite, yeah.

'Blimey, I'd best get on and do my bit.'

So I've got a nice little planting pocket there.

Well quite a big... It's as big as my fist,

so let's get something in there.

-let's see...

-Can I just pass you the trowel back, before we drop it?

This one's Aeonium balsamiferum.

Oh, right, great. Look at that.

Ho-ho, let's give this a new home.

Right. Get it in there, Little. Look at that.

Go on, look at that.

She looks like she's been there for years.

There we go, look at that, lovely.

-Fantastic.

-Right.

I mean this is amazing.

I've never done this before. Certainly not planted up,

the side of a wall. Or cliff face, really, isn't it?

-I'm going to put that in there...

-There we go, that'll look lovely in there. Nice aeonium.

-Look, yeah.

-Going in.

-Right. Hey look.

There we go.

-That looks quite pretty actually.

-It does. And you'll... Once these obviously get a lot larger

and they stand out against the cliff face, they'll look lovely, you know,

with the natural granite behind and the very dark purple.

I'm glad I had the guts to do this because

the view is just stupendous.

It's lovely, isn't it? You can't get a better office than this. This is my office.

First time I've abseiled, so this is quite something,

quite chuffed. And I'll be able to mark this spot.

Shall I be a rebel and put CW? CW was here.

I think we should go down a bit, descend

and I think it's cup of tea time, do you know?

-Do you not?

-That sounds good.

-Brew time.

-Lovely.

Let's drop out of here.

I think I've earned a drink after spending an afternoon abseiling.

But I really hope I get the opportunity to do this again.

Just down the coast from St Michael's Mount is another

stunning cliff-top creation.

This is the spectacular Minack Theatre.

Every season the Minack stages 16 different productions,

a new one every week throughout the summer.

The theatre is now one of the top tourist

attractions in the south-west.

But the story of its creation is as remarkable as its setting.

It was the life work of one extraordinary woman, Rowena Cade,

who built it entirely by hand with the help of her faithful gardeners.

Rowena was born in 1893 to a family who loved dressing up

and putting on plays.

She moved to Cornwall with her mother after her father died.

She bought this headland and built a home here.

Rowena was rich enough not to have to work

but she needed something to do.

Her life changed in 1931 when she built a clifftop stage for

the local amateur dramatics group to use for a production of The Tempest.

Zoe Curnow first came to work at the Minack as a student

and is now the general manager.

She takes up Rowena's story.

It would have been really hard physical work to create what

was essentially a fairly wild cliff gully into the flat stage area

and the roughly terraced seating,

which was the precursor of what we now see today.

They would have been moving granite around,

they would have been carrying wheelbarrows of rock to fill in gullies and to level off surfaces.

Apparently the only thing they managed to lose was one

wheelbarrow, over down into the sea.

There was an article in The Times,

at the time, about the production and I think all of that together

led Rowena to think about actually this could actually be something

that we could try again next year and going forward into the future.

Over the next 60 years, Rowena put all her time,

effort and her own money into her theatre.

She even salvaged timbers that had washed up on the beach

and carried them up the cliff single-handed.

It's just such an unusual place.

People come and look at the site and they're,

they just can't believe that this was actually, you know, built,

financed effectively, by just the one determined lady, Rowena Cade.

This is the fifth summer that actor

and storyteller Craig Johnson has brought a show to the Minack.

You have local people but you also have people on holiday,

and from all different countries,

so you've got this brilliant mixed audience of ages. For a lot

of them, you can see in their faces, they've never seen anything

like this before, so it's a really amazing place, I think, to come to.

For these kids, a trip to the Minack could inspire a lifetime's

love of the theatre, and it's all down to the life's

work of one single-minded woman, Rowena Cade.

It's nearly the end of my time in Cornwall

and I've come back to Trebah to have a last stroll through

the garden with head gardener, Darren, and volunteer, Marcus.

'Marcus spent many happy years here as a child

'when Trebah was a private house. His dad was the head gardener who

'worked so hard to create one of my favourite parts of the garden.

Marcus, your dad planted these amazing hydrangeas.

Are you proud of that?

I'm very proud of that.

Each and every time that I walk down the valley, I'm reminded

of that particular time and I can, even now in my mind's eye, see

him actually planting some of these hydrangeas in these very spots.

You left Cornwall and you came back,

but what does Cornwall really mean to you?

Cornwall is my home and I have travelled elsewhere.

I've spent time in London and in Devon, but Cornwall has

always seemed like home to me and never more so than now, really.

Darren, what I want to know is,

how are you going to move the garden forward?

How are you going to use it? Are you going to develop it?

I think it's always very important to remember that the garden

is there for the visitors, so it's important to sort

of develop different themes and also do more with things like theatre.

We've just built a new amphitheatre and we're doing various

different performances that we'll do throughout the year.

We can have some of the trees lit up,

we can do sort of walks in the autumn, to see the autumn colour.

So seeing the garden in a different light I think is always great

and obviously sound in the garden is always such a major feature

and highlighting your senses, I think.

Both Darren and Marcus have reminded me how important it is to

enjoy a garden with your ears as well as your eyes.

Whether it's water tumbling over a cascade,

wind whispering through the leaves or the calling of birdsong,

in a garden we're surrounded by nature's symphony.

And I want to create a lasting musical memory for the people

I've met here at Trebah.

To help me out,

I've been in touch with a very special group of Cornishmen.

These are the singers from the Treverva male voice choir,

one of the oldest and best in the county.

And you know we're going to start with warm-up, don't you.

Oh, yeah, you get that, right.

Just as in Wales, the Cornish choirs have links with the mining industry.

But here, they were digging for tin, not coal.

Tin was first found in Cornwall rivers 2,000 years ago.

By the 19th century, the mines stretched deep underground

and Cornwall became the biggest producer of tin in the world.

And each mine had its own male voice choir.

The tin seams eventually gave out and the last tin mine

closed in 1998.

But the choirs have carried on their musical traditions

and today they attract members of all ages and from all walks of life.

Norman Hyde, the longest-standing member, knows why a song underground

was so important for the original founders of the choir.

The miners, I mean, they'd go down their mine, they would

get in the lift and have to go down hundreds and hundreds of feet and,

of course, they would start singing as they went down, more or less to...

well, cheer their self up because it wasn't a good way to live.

THEY SING

I mean, they were like rats in holes down there to start.

It's not like today's mining,

where you go in a place that's ten- foot high.

Down there then, they were down on their hands and knees

and I think that the music and singing together just

carried them through, through the hard part of life.

The choir is rehearsing one of the most famous Cornish songs, The White Rose.

And it's one that means a lot to Norman.

One verse starts -

"The first time I met you, my darling."

Well, that was the first thing when I first met my wife, when I was home

on leave, and we fell in love then and we were married for 65 years.

# The first time I met you my darling... #

And that was her favourite piece.

I was unfortunate to lose my wife five years ago

and then, within four months, I lost my daughter, and if it hadn't

been for this choir, I don't think I would have been here now.

You know, it was such a jolt, but I've got

so many good mates in the choir that they helped me through.

# Out one morning fair

# Heave away, haul away... #

Belonging to the choir isn't just about keeping the traditions

alive for the sake of it.

It's about friendship, community and creating great memories.

# All the way you'll hear me sing

# We're bound for south Australia. #

CHEERING

As a thank you to the people who have shared their memories and

their gardens with me, I've arranged a very special command performance.

I'm proud as punch that the choir has agreed to join me here

at Trebah and Norman's celebrating a very special anniversary.

It actually is 68 years today that I joined the choir.

So, a long time ago.

The choir has been creating wonderful harmonies since 1936.

But this is the first time in their history that they've have

sung at Trebah and I hope they're happy with the location.

Cornish, innit? Handsome.

As it's such a special occasion, I've invited friends

and family of the choir, as well as the staff from Trebah to join us.

And my guest of honour is Marcus,

whose dad was responsible for the splendour of this hydrangea valley.

Well, I've had a most amazing day with you and it's been very special

to share time with you, but there's one thing that's come

through as a common thread and that's the atmosphere of Trebah.

Not just the plants and the stories and the magnificence of the site,

but the fact that you both appreciate the magic of this garden

and tonight, I hope you're going to enjoy a very special moment.

So, it's over to you, sir, and the choir.

MUSIC: The White Rose

# I love the White Rose

# In its splendour

# I love the White Rose

# In its bloom

# I love the White Rose

# So fair as it grows

# It's the rose that reminds me of you

# The first time I met you

# My darling

# Your face was as red as the rose

# But now your dear face has grown paler

# As pale as the lily white rose... #

THEY CONTINUE IN CORNISH

APPLAUSE

Gentlemen, thank you very much indeed,

you've not just made my day, but you've made my year.

Thank you very much indeed.

And for me, I'd like to thank you and the choir.

I've visited this garden many times and I never,

ever thought I would have the privilege of hearing

a Cornish choir sing in THE best Cornish garden, so thank you both

and thank you, the choir, for a magical experience for me as well.

Thank you all very much.

During my trip to Cornwall,

it's been a joy to visit two of my favourite

places in the world, Trebah and St Michael's Mount and it was

a privilege to share the memories of the people I met along the way.

After experiencing the unforgettable choir performance,

I can leave with a song in my heart.