The Indiana Jones of gardening

31 January 2007

PLANT-LOVING ARISTOCRAT: Tom Hart Dyke had the idea for his World Garden while being held prisoner in Columbia. PA3585-31.

TOM Hart Dyke is not happy. He has just learnt that he will not be receiving a shipment of rare plants that he hand picked last month from the Australian jungle.

Instead they will have every last grain of soil removed from their roots before being sprayed with disinfectant. They will then sit on a shelf in a government building for three months where they will surely die.

Hart Dyke is not a parent, but if he were this would be like seeing his children tortured and then left to die slowly from their wounds. "I am hugely upset, devastated in fact," he says. "I was informed last night about this blasted new EU law that's only a month old and it spells certain doom for my plants."

Let's back-track a little. Just who exactly is this Tom Hart Dyke chap? Apart from being obsessed with all things horticultural, he is a castle dwelling, Wellington-boot wearing character whose family own and run a 700-year-old estate that once encompassed most of north Kent.

Proud creator of the 'World Garden', with more than 7,000 different species of flora and fauna, the 30-year-old also gives lectures, broadcasts and writes books. He is also the survivor of a nine-month kidnapping ordeal on South/Central American border. Today, he is not just a gardener - he is the Indiana Jones of gardeners.

"I found an incredible plant in a crevasse in Australia, but it was pretty tricky to reach. If I had fallen, that would be it, dead! It's known as the 'stinging tree' - and it's not called that for nothing. It has razor-sharp hairs which release acid. If you touch it you will be in agony for up to 10 months.

"Did I wear a harness? Come on, this is me we're talking about. I wouldn't know how to put on a harness!"

After collecting seeds, Hart Dyke intends to grow the stinging plant in the World Garden at Lullingstone Castle, near Eynsford. "It will have to be put behind a fence," he explains. "It's far too dangerous for people to touch."

Getting Hart Dyke to stay on the subject is like trying to teach your dog to play chess. He has just returned from a two-month trip, starting in Australia and ending up in Latin America, his first visit there since the kidnapping.

His energy and enthusiasm for plants is infectious. His sense of childish wonderment is enough to make anyone think differently about the natural world that surrounds us, but we so rarely notice.

He was kidnapped in 2000 when in Panama looking for rare flowers with mountaineer and fellow thrill-seeker Paul Winder, from Chelmsford. They had trekked through a - it's called the Darien Gap - and reached the Columbian border in about a week and a half. He recalls: "It was on my sister's birthday, March 16, that it happened. We entered a clearing and our guides disappeared. Then we saw men pointing guns at us. On closer inspection our guides hadn't disappeared, they were on the floor. Before long, so were we. It's amazing how quickly your legs cave in when there's a gun pointed at you."

They were forced to write notes to their families demanding a $5million ransom. They were told that failure to pay would result in their son's deaths. Neither family ever received the notes.

"We spent the whole time in captivity just walking. We probably walked 10,000 miles in nine months. Everyone except mum thought we were dead."

Despite the ordeal, Hart Dyke is astonishingly forgiving. "At the time I hated them, but now I just feel sorry for them. We were trespassing. Also, some of them were as young as six. We'd be quite happy to meet them in the pub, but we wouldn't go back there."

The guerrillas were also convinced that the plant-loving aristo and his rock climber mate were a pair CIA spies, with rich friends. "One night our captors asked to hear our national anthem so we decided to have a bit of a laugh. We sang Always Look on the Bright Side of Life. We got a look of absolute horror from the guerrillas but that was followed by five minutes of hysterics."

But the kidnapping was not all fun and games. It was when Hart Dyke reached his lowest and most desperate ebb that he had his epiphany. "On June 16 they put us in a palm bunker and we were not allowed even to see each other for six weeks. We were told that in five hours we'd be shot. I didn't know what to do, so I opened up my diary and began scribbling my dream garden plan."

This became the World Garden, a place for the public to learn about nature from all corners of the planet. Since then he has worked tirelessly to collect the most fascinating plants the world has to offer.

I wondered how it felt for him to return to the continent that nearly killed him.

"Well Venezuela is a long way away from Columbia, and deliberately so! I still wouldn't be happy to go to Panama or Columbia or the Darien Gap again.

"My mission statement on this trip was to find the World Gardens first 'hardy plant'." This is something that can withstand harsh differences in temperature and also frosts. The Sierra Nevada area of Venezuela is notorious for extreme weather. "There was a lot of high-altitude climbing. My guide and I were at altitudes of 16,000 ft, 5,007 metres, lots of climbing in the frozen valleys. That's where the hardy plants are. The landscape was spectacular, very lunar. The glaciers are not permanent, so you get these very weird rugged very rocky, shards everywhere. But I found my hardy plant, the Frailejon, I found forests of them. They don't exist anywhere else, only in that part of Venezuela."

Despite his love for adventure, his roots are firmly set in Kent. Perhaps it is because the Hart Dykes have inhabited this patch of land since 1361, that he says there is nowhere he would rather go back to.

"I want to see the drizzle! I miss it so much when I'm away and I can't wait to get back to it!"

oliver.good@archant.co.uk

lTom Hart Dyke is a regular columnist in all Kentish Times Newspapers. To read his famous 'Green Man' column see page 47.