The productive orchard and garden plan

To the east, on the orchard side, we want to create a Hub building for the production of cider, juices, distillery, micro-brewery and teaching kitchen. In the middle of the building we want to have a refectory café for staff and students, and where visitors to the site can taste what is grown and see the products being made. Each of the separate hubs will be run by a partner, and this will also probably be true of the teaching kitchen and the café. We will have a retail facility selling our products and those of partners. It is really important to us that Gillyflower Farm ensures that it does not cannibalise its neighbours’ markets by selling products currently uniquely sold in Lostwithiel, and not made by ourselves.

In addition, Gillyflower Farm does not want to create a farmers market such as one currently exists in Lostwithiel. We would, in truth, want to be a part of this. Gillyflower’s ‘market’, is for the sale of its own produce. We want to enhance our town, assist in building its brand, and work with residents and traders to optimise the advantages we may bring for the wider community

The catering and the experience of food production are essential to developing the brand of what we do. Having 19 accommodation capsules - or referred by us as ‘drums’ – with an additional drum that would be used for ticketing and management, has a slow payback period. This is a very small development by floorplan and amounts to much less than 4% of the site. The drums are beautiful and have a light footprint and are restricted to two areas, in an area of under 2 acres.

This development provides an ideal community for product creation, education and we hope, incubating new green businesses to emerge. The agronomic world is in a state of massive change and the regenerative farming techniques we champion will become the norm – where the impact is measured in terms of soil health, soil porosity and chemical balance, biomass grown, bio-diversity enhanced, and carbon captured.

Gillyflower Farm is possibly one of the most interesting and important horticultural projects in the country. It is an idea that has been in our heads for years but the opportunity and location were never there. Heligan is a historic landscape with records that demonstrate what was grown there.  At the outset, it was to be historically correct to a Victorian model of c1870 in Cornwall demonstrating the skills of the extraordinary horticulturists who, in a period before refrigeration, were charged with feeding a large number of people for 365 days a year. It is an astonishing feat. Eden is a charitable Trust with a mission to demonstrate human interdependence with the natural world, on a global scale and while there is a global kitchen garden on the site and an old orchard in the adjacent Restineas Farm, this was not an appropriate place to demonstrate at scale the relevance of old varieties in a world where marketing and big agriculture had all but destroyed anything that did not have maximum yield, freezing qualities and little susceptibility to disease …nor yet would there be the space to demonstrate food production in the artisanal way we believe it should be done.

At Gillyflower Farm, we want to draw together crops that could yield new markets, excite new interest and spark a cuisine that could emerge from Cornwall. To that end, we want to provide a place where we could train people to become excellent horticulturists. Further than that, we want Gillyflower Farm to be an experiment which, on finding crops that the public liked, we would form a co-operative with our neighbouring farms to develop this added value. We have talked with Trewithen Dairy, with the Duchy, with several independent neighbouring farms (including Cornish Seaberry Company), and we have also had conversations with Boconnoc - in short, with many of the local growers and farmers who have a base around Lostwithiel. The reason for this is that for this venture to really succeed, we need partners, producers, chefs and restaurant partners. Our ambition is that Gillyflower Farm will become an overarching brand that will shine a spotlight on our collective produce and products from that produce, and make it available through our virtual farm website. In this manner, customers – wherever they are – will know when things are ripening and can genuinely buy seasonally.

In order for this to be successful, we want to ensure that we do not undertake anything where there are others locally able to do it for us. To this end, we have talked to a major local cider maker, a juicer, a brewer and a distiller whom we would like to work with. You will have noticed that our fruit crops suggest a far wider palette than gin or rum!

In 2019, we attended the Neighbourhood Plan meetings at the Community Hall in Lostwithiel. Our plans were still in development and we only had sketch designs. We made a presentation and the people who attended said they thought it would be very good for Lostwithiel. When the Neighbourhood Plan was published we were pleased to see that a project such as we were wanting to create was mentioned in Section 98 of the Plan, and this encouragement led to us proceeding with full planning applications. To that end, designs were drawn up, and Lostwithiel Town Council was addressed in December 2020. Once again there was widespread support, and no particular concerns were raised. We have therefore been surprised at the subsequent assertion that we had submitted the application without consultation, however, we have a huge desire to engage with people in respect of the journey that we have been on, and are completely transparent in our ambitions.

We want to create a place where people can learn, and where they can come and stay and enjoy the locality, while they learn in a mixture of leisure learning and professional learning. Gillyflower Farm is ideally located for a family as while some may wish to learn all day, others may want to take part in activities which we and the locality can provide

We have applied to build the ‘drums’ – exquisite small eco-lodges designed by Roderick James Architects. Roderick James was the co-founder of the Centre for Alternative Technology in Wales (CAT), and you can see his beautiful designs with sedum roofs online at his website (www.roderickjamesarchitects.com). We have learned at Heligan that the student year dovetails (naturally) with the holiday periods, meaning that a mixed form of accommodation wherein term-time accommodation is used by professionals and in holiday times by holiday learners, makes it possible to maximise the weeks the accommodation is in use. It also means that there will be people wanting to use the local facilities and services within Lostwithiel throughout the year.

In the first instance, one of the drum houses will be used as a reception building whilst the main hub is being built. Upon completion of that, we would like to revert the use back to a holiday unit thereby making 20 units of holiday accommodation. 20 is the minimum accommodation that we need to be viable, as the capital investment and slow-growing habit of our crops will make us dependent on the accommodation income to pay the other bills.

We have been approached by a number of the local schools about how we can involve them in the experience of growing and making here, and we will of course accommodate this as much as we reasonably can. We have also been approached by a number of universities; Plymouth and Cranfield among them, and by students including within Lostwithiel who have already expressed a desire to be involved.

We also believe that Gillyflower Farm can become a hub not only for learning, but recovery and well-being. We are all learning how the natural world and outdoor activity has a healing quality and, at Heligan and in due course Gillyflower, we have been working with specialists in this area. Dr Lucy Loveday and, world-renowned alternative practitioner Rupert Issacson, who wrote the bestseller, ‘The Horse Boy’ and thereafter set up schools specialising in Horse Boy and Movement Method training.  This concentrates on how both children and adults can recover or be ‘unlocked’ from trauma using unconventional methods such as being with animals, plants, making art, cooking, growing and outside experiences. We are passionate about this and with the events of the ongoing pandemic weighing on everyone’s shoulders, the need for this sort of work will be increasingly necessary. We hope that the orchards, river, lakes and woods, along with the facilities we are proposing will be the perfect environment for this. Since our project has gone public we have been approached by several practitioners who would like to discuss collaboration with us.

So this is our ambition. Many elements of this project are referred to as legacy projects, due to the length of time that the projects will take to mature. Some of our fruit and nut trees will take 40 years to become commercially viable. The Battle of Lostwithiel Registered Battleground within our land is shortly going to be planted with 130 mulberry trees, which to our knowledge has never been attempted in the south-west before. These trees are notoriously slow and difficult to grow, but in our view will be a far better memorial to those who fell in the 1644 battle.

Our hope is that the work we have done, and the work still to do will provide significant value and opportunity to Lostwithiel and its residents, but we also believe it will play a part in the changing landscape of agriculture, horticulture and agronomy, far beyond the curtilage of Gillyflower Farm’s hedgerows – a legacy worth working and waiting for.