Tom Hart Dyke, creator of the UK’s first ever World Garden of Plants at Lullingstone Castle in Kent, first shot to international prominence in 2000, when he was kidnapped in the Columbian jungle on an orchid hunting expedition that went dangerously wrong. Tom and his travelling companion, Paul Winder, were taken hostage while trekking through ‘The Darien Gap’, a dangerous place abandoned by all to warring guerrilla factions.
The idea of The World Garden was born in the depths of despair when, three months into their kidnap ordeal, Tom and his fellow captive Paul were told to prepare to die that night. Paul spent the afternoon of that fateful day in prayer, but Tom decided that the best course of action would be to spend his final day on Earth designing his dream garden! He spent the day drawing plans in his diary for a ‘World Garden’ containing the plants he’d collected from across the globe, planted out in their respective countries of origin.
Fortunately, Tom and Paul were not executed and after nine months in captivity they were released on 16 December 2000. On their return, Tom and Paul penned the best-selling book The Cloud Garden (Transworld 2002) detailing their experiences in the jungle. Tom’s jungle antics, such as building gardens in the mountains, much to the annoyance of his captors, cemented his reputation as a ‘plant nut’!
Since his release Tom has been busy building the ‘World’ in a two-acre Tudor and Victorian walled area at Lullingstone Castle, his ancestral home. One-acre contains the World Garden laid out as a miniature map of the world with plants located in their correct miniature native land masses. The other acre hosts the ‘Hot and Spikey’ Cactus House, the ‘Cloud Garden’ temperate House and the new ‘Islamic Bulb’ House. The plant collection of the World Garden totals around 6,000 different types of plants and each month it continues to grow and develop, with many rare and new important botanical specimens being added from Tom’s travels.
Since his Colombian captivity, Tom has made five intrepid (but safer) return journeys to South America. His collecting travels have also taken him to the Canary Islands, the Cape Verde Islands, Tasmania, the Atlas Mountains in Morocco and the remote Mentawai Islands in Indonesia.