LULLINGSTONE CASTLE - When the South American kidnappers of botanist Tom Hart Dyke told him he was to be executed in five hours, he sat down and designed a garden for his ancestral home in Britain.
The kidnappers later released him and now the success of the award-winning
garden has saved the family castle from the verge of bankruptcy.
"Gardening is huge therapy," he said, proudly showing off the "world garden" he has created at Lullingstone Castle where his family has lived for 20 generations.
"I have now exorcised the ghosts."
Seven years ago, Hart Dyke and mountaineer Paul Winder were seized by Marxist guerrillas in the Darien Gap region between Panama and Colombia where they had been searching for orchids.
Their ordeal was the subject of a best-selling book and two TV documentaries were devoted to the castle, which had been facing closure.
It now attracts up to 20,000 visitors a year to a beautiful valley in the Kent. The world garden, which re-opens next month, boasts almost 8000 plants from around the globe.
Memories of the day he faced death are as vivid as ever for Hart Dyke. "I live each day now -- and more so than ever," said the 30-year-old.
"This one guy came in and said 'You have five hours to live before we blow your head off'. Then he just walked off. Was it a game or a trick? We just didn't know."
"When Scarface -- that's what we called him -- came back, he produced boiled armadillo for supper and never mentioned what happened five hours before."
After nine months trekking with their captors through rain forest, the two were released without explanation.
Last December, Hart Dyke returned to South America on a plant-hunting expedition to Venezuela. "I was literally shaking as we landed, I really went to pot," he confessed.
"But the main thing was to knock my bloody nightmares on the head. They were absolute corkers -- Mum and Dad being lined up outside our church and their heads blown off, my granny being cut up with a machete.
"But now those nightmares have subsided."
- REUTERS
