Not many people would agree to buy a new home before even considering selling their own, but for Mike Gilmore it was a case of love at first sight — not with the house but with the garden that is!
For most of us it would have been hard to see the potential of the one-acre garden at Halwill which amounted to a forlorn rubbish dump, but Mike knew he had discovered somewhere very special indeed.
Now, two years on, a garden restoration every bit as fascinating as the Lost Gardens of Heligan is beginning to take shape.
Once the kitchen garden of the 800-acre Winsford Towers Estate, the country retreat of George and Maria Louisa Medley of Park Lane, London, Winsford Walled Garden is being lovingly brought back to life by Mike together with his mother Aileen Birks and Russian-born wife Tanya.
As Mike explains, it was not something he had planned to do, it just kind of happened: 'We were very happy living in Weston-Super-Mare, in a modest house with a modest garden that was absolutely stuffed with plants.
'But mum's curiosity was sparked during a landscape painting course at Rosemoor Gardens when she was surprised to see so many properties with large gardens in the area.'
On Aileen's return to Weston, she went on the internet and found several properties of interest. Winsford was the third they looked at, although at the time they had no idea just what lay ahead.
'The reason we did not go there first was because much of the garden was omitted from the sales details in a new and desperate attempt by the agents to interest anyone in the property,' continued Mike.
'The site had been on the market for two years — although the house was very nice, as soon as potential buyers stepped out into the garden they thought, "Oh, my God" and were terrified.'
When you consider that the first six months were spent demolishing pig pens, concrete block wall, kennels, toilets and chicken houses and removing 40 tonnes of car components and five cubic metres of broken glass plus huge swathes of ivy, brambles, laurel and leylandii, it is not hard to imagine how it must have appeared to the houseseeker.
For Mike and Aileen, who are potty about gardening, it had the opposite effect.
'As soon as we saw the fabulous south-facing wall that was it — how many times do you find a walled garden on the market? It is basically the shangri-la for most keen gardeners,' said Mike.
'The estate agent was giving us a tour of the house, but as she started on the kitchen I was walking out the front door into the garden — mum was itching to get out too.'
There and then, they said they would buy it, but on the journey home, the realisation of what they had said started to kicked in.
'We did not know how we were going to buy it, we had not even put our own house on the market,' said Mike. 'There followed several frantic months before our arrival at Winsford.'
Since moving in on June 23, 1999, the trio have barely paused for breath. But as they discovered later, the wall was not the only gem to be discovered.
'We were making plans for an Oriental garden at the rear of the site, but when we started to clear the undergrowth we found a 110ft greenhouse beneath it,' said Mike.
As they pieced together bits of information relating to the site with their own discoveries from attacking it with diggers and spades, they found out that Winsford had more greenhouses than any other garden for its size — 12 in just over half an acre — built in only the finest teak wood.
'We compare this to Queen Victoria's 32-acre kitchen garden at Windsor which only had twice the footage of greenhouses and there is a lot less walking at Winsford,' said Mike.
Heated by a boiler room in the corner of the garden, which is going to be the 'potting shed', the mechanisms and designs of the greenhouses are so elaborate that experts who visit the site are stunned.
'One garden author who came here said she had visited over 400 walled gardens in the UK and had never seen anything like it,' added Mike. 'People are constantly bowled over by the number of unique features here which show Victorian horticultural ingenuity and workmanship at its very best.'
At one time, 16 gardeners would have lived on site and that rose to 32 in the summer.
The reason why the garden has remained unknown until now is because the main house caught fire and was subsequently demolished during the 1950s. But far from recreating a Victorian vegetable garden, Mike, Aileen and Tanya are planting the exotics of today.
'The garden was commissioned in 1885 to grow exotics of the time such as citrus and soft fruits,' explained Mike. 'We are bringing that up to date in terms of plants but using the timeless ingenuity of the Victorian engineers.'
With Mike keen on exotics such as ginger and banana plants, Aileen a fuchsia fanatic and Tanya a sucker for all things herbal, the style of planting will be a combination of the three.
Ten tonnes of pot plants were transported from their home in Somerset and plants are sourced from all over the world via the internet.
'We have visited every nursery from Land's End to Bristol but our most expensive buy was £1,500 worth of bamboo from Portugal,' said Mike.
'We wanted the most bullish, bad tempered bamboo you could buy because unlike most people in this country we wanted it to spread.'
The bamboo will form a windbreak and enclose a secret garden at the rear of the house which will house many tender species.
The walled garden contains conifers, shrubs, alpine plants and perennials for all-year-colour, a wooden pergola and water features making use of the extensive network of underground cisterns and many materials reclaimed from the garden such as huge pieces of Delabole slate and red brick.
In the summer, the wall houses 80 hanging baskets containing many of Aileen's fuchsia collection, which amounts to more than 200 varieties.
But even though an extraordinary amount of work has been done, Mike said that at the moment you really have to be something of a gardener to appreciate what they are trying to achieve.
'You have to look at things with a twinkle of imagination,' he said. 'Obviously, we do not have a national budget and we are doing all the work, so things take time.'
With Mike and Aileen working in the garden full-time, Tanya, who is the general manager for the Confederation of Dental Employers and based in Holsworthy, is currently the main breadwinner.
In time, they hope their restoration project will bring in an income, especially with the sale of many rare plants which are being propagated from the 1,200 varieties they currently have.
To learn more about this unique garden, which is open through the winter by appointment, tune into Gardeners' Tales on Carlton on Friday, November 30 at 2.40pm.
Mike regularly gives lectures to garden clubs, WI groups and other interested parties — to find out more telephone 01409 221477.