Tom Hart Dyke interviewed
Above: Tom Hart Dyke
Above: The World Garden, Lullingstone Castle, Kent
Tom Hart Dyke is missing. There’s no need for a search party this time, however, his teachers have a fair idea as to the whereabouts of the energetic eight-year-old - the orchids are in bloom on the chalk downs behind the school in Otford, and Tom’s gone AWOL. Again.
Reminiscing about his early plant-hunting days, Tom tells me: “Orchid hunting began in earnest for me on the Kentish Downs, where I’d go missing from class for hours during the growing season. It was hopeless.
“I was always in trouble, playing truant. It happened every year. I’d be forced to stand with my hands behind my back, below the fire alarm in the hallway, standing out my punishment.’
At the age of nine, Tom began to make detailed botanical journals cataloguing the orchids close to his family estate of Lullingstone, near Sevenoaks. He’d spend days methodically marking out the sites of interest and logging his finds.
Tom says: “I’ve still got the records that I made in the 1980s, proof that you don’t have to go to far-flung climes to find exotic beauties – we have some amazing stuff, right here in Kent!”
I was always in trouble, playing truant. It happened every year
However, the lure of adventure and seeing plants in their native habitats proved irresistible to Tom, and aged 21, with a bursary from the Kent Garden’s Trust and the RHS, along with funding from the Merlin Trust, he began his epic three-year adventure around the globe.
This trip would eventually lead to his well-documented, nine-month incarceration in the jungles of Panama and Colombia at the hands of gun-toting guerrillas.
A chance meeting with a backpacker at a hostel in Mexico, just weeks before Tom was due to return home to Kent, led to this risky plant-hunting expedition in the no-go area of the ‘the Darien Gap’, the only break in the Panamerican highway. A place notorious for drug-runners and lawless guerrillas.
Tale of survival
Tom’s amazing tale of survival at the hands of the guerrillas, who were at times intrigued by their hostages and at other times played Russian roulette with their lives, never fails to amaze.
Tom says that he and his fellow captive, Paul Winder, spent the entire nine months trying to prove who they were. “We had to show them that I was just a fanatical plant hunter, and Paul was an adventurer. We’re absolutely sure that it was our humour and our take on things, my obsessive plant hunting in the jungle – much to the guerrillas’ annoyance - and Paul’s talk of skiing, that finally led to our release. They were either sick of us, or they believed us in the end!”
Kent’s most famous modern-day plant hunter is the 20th generation of Hart Dyke’s to live at his ancestral home of Lullingstone Castle. Tom grew up playing hide and seek around Queen Anne’s bed, and busying himself in his granny’s herb garden on the Estate.
Horticulture, history and adventure are in the blood. The Hart Dyke’s entertained big in the past, with Henry VII, Henry VIII, Queen Anne and Disraeli all visitors to the beautiful Tudor estate.
We had to show the guerillas that I was just a fanatical plant hunter
On Tom’s maternal grandmother’s side, adventure was also in the genes. “I knew of my adventuring great, great uncles mainly through Granny,” explains Tom.
“Uncle Boyd was an ornithologist, who discovered Lake Chad to the western world – that’s a pretty big thing to say! I guess the adventurous side of things come from that side of the family – the baldness definitely come from that side.”
Prior to his adventure in Colombia, Tom didn’t know much of his great uncles and their dangerous trips abroad. He says: “We’ve talked about it lot since I came home, and I’ve read one of the books. There are definite parallels - the whole wanderlust thing – wanting to see the world in which we live. For me it was plants rather than birds.”
Kidnapped
Tom’s two uncles, Claude and Boyd, both died abroad – Claude from a tropical fever, and Boyd when he made the return to trip to visit his brother’s grave. Tom explains: “He was shot and murdered in the end. Buried next to Claude, he got to see his brother again, but not in the way he’d intended.”
Tom very nearly didn’t make it home himself when his South American adventure hit the headlines in July 2000, and there was talk of the two missing men being dead. Tom’s parents were told to give their son up for dead, but this was something that neither Tom’s mother, Sarah, nor father, Guy, could do.
In fact, Sarah travelled to Colombia on a fact-finding mission, putting up posters of her missing son – pictured in his flip flops holding an orchid plant, taken two weeks before his capture.
Never giving up
Tom says: “I’m indebted to my parents. Their support has been amazing. Dad took the call from Brian Winder, Paul’s dad, and straightaway Dad just knew, oh dear, Tom was missing, and not on the Kentish downs this time - but in the Colombian jungle.
Tom’s parents never gave up hope. Packets of seeds continued to arrive at Lullingstone, sent from around the globe via the post by Tom, prior to his kidnap. And as the packets of seeds arrived, Sarah Hart Dyke decided that she needed to do something, anything, to keep her son’s memory alive.
So she began to send the seeds out to RHS Kew, to RHS Wisley, RHS Edinburgh and to RHS Wakehurst. Many of the seeds that Tom collected in Tasmania are now growing at Kew, Edinburgh and at Wisley.
Tom recalls: “It was an amazing feeling to see my seeds growing at Kew – a marvellous rush to see the initials T.H.D on the label of the GUM TOP STRINGY BARK - EUCALYTPUS DELEGATENSIS SUBSP. TASMANIENSIS.
“It’s very rewarding, to say the least – like coming full circle. I was inspired by Kew from a very young age, and to have my stuff there from a trip that I nearly never came back from gives an extra potency.”
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