When Mohamedou Salahi arrived at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, in August of 2002, he was hopeful. He knew why he had been detained: he had crossed paths with Al Qaeda operatives, and his cousin had once called him from Osama bin Laden’s phone. But Salahi was no terrorist—he held no extremist views—and had no information about any plots. He trusted the American system of justice and thought the authorities would realize their mistake before long.

He was wrong.

Salahi spent fifteen years at Guantánamo, where he was subjected to some of the worst excesses of America’s war on terror; Donald Rumsfeld personally signed off on the orders for his torture. And, under torture, Salahi confessed to everything—even though he had done nothing. “If they would have wanted him to confess to being on the grassy knoll for the J.F.K. assassination, I’m sure we could have got him to confess to that, too,” Mark Fallon, who led an investigation unit at Guantánamo, said.

Ben Taub reported Salahi’s story for The New Yorker and tried to understand what had gone wrong in the fight against Al Qaeda. Salahi met Taub in Mauritania, because when the U.S. released him it was under the condition that Mauritania would withhold his passport. Salahi would like to go abroad—he needs medical treatment, and he hopes to live in a democracy. But, for an innocent victim of Guantánamo, being released isn’t the same as being free.

With Congress in recess and the Democratic debates on hiatus until September—when the 2020 Presidential campaign will kick into high gear—this seems like a good point to take stock of where things stand politically. After all, the past few months have seen a series of major happenings, including the long-awaited publication of the Mueller report; a worsening in the humanitarian crisis at the southern border; the President hurling racist abuse at Democratic members of Congress and calling a major American city a “disgusting . . . rodent infested mess”; a major policy reversal by the Federal Reserve on interest rates; a bit of economic history being made when the current economic expansion became the longest on record; the renewal of missile testing by North Korea; a further ratcheting up of the tensions with Iran; and new threats from Donald Trump of a trade war with China, which sparked another market drop.

Surely, all these events must have had some impact on Trump’s standing in the country. But, actually, they haven’t. If you look at the Real Clear Politics poll average, which combines data from a wide range of polls, you will find that the President’s approval rating is 43.3 per cent. That is within a single percentage point of where Trump’s rating was at the start of the year, and it is virtually identical to where it was a year ago. On August 2, 2018, the figure was 43.5 per cent. Another twelve months of political turmoil, and practically no change at all.

This extraordinary stability suggests a couple of things. First, most Americans have already made up their minds about Trump, and the disruptions that he continues to cause on a daily basis only confirm their opinions. Second, the President and his advisers must know this to be true. It certainly appears to be shaping their 2020 campaign strategy, which is running on two tracks.

The first imperative for Trump is to fire up his core supporters and get them to the polls, especially in the Midwestern states that will be the key to winning the Electoral College. Hence, Trump’s regular appearances at huge MAGA rallies, such as the one he held in Cincinnati this week. Another motivating tool is Trump’s Twitter feed, which enables him to bypass the mainstream media, and issue his incitements—many of them racial—directly to his supporters. As the election approaches, a third tactic will become increasingly important: using the candidate’s already plentiful campaign funds to buy targeted advertising on platforms like Facebook and YouTube. In the second quarter alone, the Trump campaign raised about a hundred and five million dollars— approximately thirty million dollars more than Barack Obama raised at a comparable stage in 2011.

Citing Trump’s resources and the opportunities afforded to him by social media, members of the Trump team, particularly his campaign manager, Brad Parscale, have insisted that the national opinion polls are a misleading indicator of his prospects for reëlection. “The way turnout now works, the abilities we have now to turn out voters—the polling can’t understand that,” Parscale said to CBS News when Trump formally launched his reëlection campaign, in June. “And that’s why it was so wrong in 2016. . . . Nobody got it right—not one public poll. The reason why—it's not 1962 anymore.” Last month, after the Trump campaign revealed its second-quarter fund-raising haul, Parscale told Fox News, “We’re not even in the main portion of the campaign yet and we’re already raising large numbers. This President, in the voice he has, the message he can control, in the way he can control what’s happening on the media. No one can touch this.”

The other half of Trump’s campaign strategy is based on demonizing the Democratic Party and its Presidential ticket. Trump was unpopular in 2016, too, but so was his opponent, Hillary Clinton. Enough of the voters who disliked both Trump and Clinton broke in Trump’s direction to give him a narrow victory in the Electoral College despite his big loss in the popular vote. In trying to repeat the trick, Trump is already portraying some elected Democrats as extremist and anti-American—and the rest as weaklings who are in hock to the extremist anti-Americans. In his campaign speech in Cincinnati, he spent all or part of twenty-nine minutes attacking the Democrats, according to an analysis by the Washington Post’s Philip Bump, compared to twenty minutes boasting about his own economic achievements. As usual, his explication wandered all over the place, but at one point he did manage to sum up much of his indictment in a single sentence: “Democrats are now the party of high taxes, high crime, open borders, late-term abortion, and they're the party, frankly, of socialism.”

By now, we are used to Trump being divisive. But in the past couple of weeks he has crossed another threshold, by making it clear that he has written off large chunks of the country and their residents, and isn’t even pretending to be a leader for the entire United States. His racist assault on the home town of Billie Holiday and Thurgood Marshall evoked “centuries-old stereotypes of black places—and people—as being dirty and unhygienic,” Vox’s P. R. Lockhart noted. The Baltimore Sun’s editorial board, in a timely riposte, declared, “Better to have a few rats than to be one,” but if anyone thought it would end there they don’t know Trump. His attack on Baltimore and Representative Elijah Cummings turned out to be the beginning of a weeklong assault on cities with large minority populations and the Democrats that run them.

As the campaign intensifies, we will doubtless see more of this. And how are the Democrats responding to Trump’s scorched-earth politics? On the Presidential-campaign front, they have just completed the first stage of a primary battle that will go on for nearly another year. In Congress, meanwhile, the pressure to bring Trump to book is still growing: a majority of members of the House Democratic caucus have now come out in favor of starting some form of impeachment inquiry.

With twenty candidates on the stage over two nights, and with the CNN hosts seemingly intent on getting them to attack one another, the second round of debates was fractious and, at times, hard to follow. According to two polls taken after the debates, they didn’t have much impact on the race. Both surveys—from Morning Consult and Harvard-Harris—showed Joe Biden retaining a big lead over Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Kamala Harris, and all the rest of the candidates struggling. This has been the clear pattern in the Democratic race for some time now.

If Biden came out of this week’s debates as the biggest winner, as the polls suggest, the main theme to emerge was one I wrote about on Thursday: the bitter divide over the policy legacy of Barack Obama. In addressing health care, immigration, criminal justice, and a number of other issues, the Warren–Sanders wing of the Party is eager to move beyond the last Democratic Presidency, whereas Biden often looks like he is pushing for a third term for the Obama Administration. An important thing to watch going forward will be whether the progressives can critique Obama’s policies without being seen to criticize Obama himself, who remains highly popular among Democratic voters. Biden, for his part, has a clear interest in conflating these two things. Hence his statements the morning after the Wednesday debate, when he remarked, “I was a little surprised at how much incoming there was about Barack, about the President. . . . I don't think there’s anything that he has to apologize for.”

With no televised debates for another six weeks, media attention may well shift away from the Democratic race and focus on the Democratic leadership in the House, which is facing a summer impeachment dilemma. On Friday, the congressman Salud Carbajal, who represents a district northwest of Los Angeles, called for Trump’s impeachment, saying that he “evaded truth, encouraged his staff to lie repeatedly to investigators, and engaged in obstruction.” Carbajal’s declaration means that a majority of House Democrats—a hundred and eighteen out of two hundred and thirty-five—have now called publicly for some form of impeachment proceeding.

Nancy Pelosi, the House Speaker, is famously reluctant to go down the route of impeachment, of course. (Back in March, she said it would be a distraction from the task of defeating Trump in 2020 and achieving Democratic majorities in Congress.) But as the numbers in her caucus have shifted Pelosi has modulated her language. In a lengthy statement after Carbajal’s announcement, Pelosi said that the Mueller report “laid out ten instances of the President’s obstruction of justice,” adding that Trump’s recent attempts to frustrate investigations by various Democratic-led committees was "further evidence of obstruction of justice.” Then, after describing some of the progress these committees were making, she concluded, “We owe it to our children to insure that no present or future President can dishonor the oath of office without being held accountable. In America, no one is above the law. The President will be held accountable.”

Does this mean that Pelosi is now leaning toward impeachment? Not yet, perhaps. But with a number of progressive groups vowing to spend the summer recess exerting pressure on the impeachment holdouts in their home districts, the dilemma facing the Speaker could be even more acute when Congress reassembles for the fall session. We shall see.

Boarding at 5:35 a.m., the business traveller knows she is among her peers. She joins the calm procession of solo professionals filing onto the plane, a “shuttle.” Dressed to take meetings two hours post-landing, in a sharp collar and shiny heels, she, like her fellow-passengers, is a portrait of an earlier, more glamorous era of air travel. Except, that is, for her cell phone. Cradled between her palms for the duration of the seventy-five-minute flight, it brightens at the business traveller’s every shift, begging for attention like a Tamagotchi as she sleeps with her mouth open.

The airport staff begins to recognize the business traveller’s face. Clear ambassadors say “Welcome back” with genuine feeling as they escort her to the front of the line. Once there, her T.S.A. buddy gives her a tight-lipped smile and rolls his eyes in the direction of her boarding pass.

Often, with just a structured tote bag in tow, the business traveller is afforded an excess of space in the overhead bin above her. She knows just what to bring when commuting via plane, there and back in one day. Buses in the sky.

Ride service, airline, seat type, hotel chain, flight attendant, plane model, seatmate, in-flight snack, in-flight magazine—the business traveller has strong preferences and Vibranium-Medallion-level status.

The business traveller always knows where the gate is, traces the way in her mind. She navigates around novice travellers, with their suitcases sticking out into walkways, as they study menus at airport restaurants whose never-changing “specials” she can recite.

Simulating the routines of home, the business traveller always sets up her hotel rooms the same way. She puts her makeup bag to the left and toothbrush to the right of a round, square, or oval sink. She places the luggage rack beside the mostly too-big, occasionally too-small closet. She unplugs the alarm clock to put her cell phone on the metal, teak, or concrete nightstand. Obviously, a preferred hotel has a plethora of plugs.

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Jolting upright in her hotel bed, blinded by sunshine seeping in between blackout curtains, the business traveller knows what it is to wake and wonder, Why am I wherever I am, again?

The business traveller is an expert on the locations of quiet nooks in airports. She retreats to the North Satellite of SeaTac for a latte at its shiny Starbucks. She steps into LAX’s pet-relief area for some fresh-ish air.

The business traveller asks not “What’s the weather?” but, rather, “Is there weather?” She can estimate within thirty minutes how long a “there’s some weather in San Francisco” delay will last.

With the slightly numbing tingle of complimentary Chardonnay on her lips, the business traveller careens from the Esteemed Admirals’ Oasis to the Premier Pre-Boarding Pen, nearly missing her connection to the city where her flight crew is based.

The business traveller has mastered the proper length, frequency, and combination of droid-like tones and hums to convey polite interest in any comment made by an Uber or Lyft driver. She insures a five-star passenger rating without uttering a word in any known human language.

The business traveller returns home to find the dashed ambitions and curious choices of days or weeks prior behind her refrigerator door—hopelessly wilted vegetables, leftovers of questionable origin, and exactly one spoonful of ice cream. Still, the business traveller enjoys the journey taken on her own two feet, non-stop, from the freezer to the drawer for a spoon.

Last month, amid a rapid-fire escalation in tensions between Washington and Tehran, the Iranian Foreign Minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, received an unexpected invitation—to meet President Donald Trump in the Oval Office. The diplomatic overture was made by Senator Rand Paul, the Kentucky Republican, during a meeting with Zarif in New York on July 15th, according to American and Iranian sources and a well-informed diplomat.

With President Trump’s blessing, Paul had been working on the idea for several weeks, in consultation with the White House and the State Department. An intermediary had reached out to the Iranians on Paul’s behalf three weeks before Zarif was due in New York for meetings at the United Nations. On July 14th, the day before leaving for New York, Paul had a discussion about Iran with the President, while playing a round at the Trump golf course in Sterling, Virginia.

On July 15th, Paul and his senior adviser, Doug Stafford, met Zarif at the elegant residence of Iran’s U.N. ambassador, on Fifth Avenue, a block from the Metropolitan Museum. In his decades as a diplomat, Zarif, who studied under Condoleezza Rice’s Ph.D. adviser, at the University of Denver, has built a modest rolodex with the private numbers of members of the House and Senate. “I always see people from Congress,” Zarif told me and a small group of journalists later that week, without naming names. But this was his first meeting with Paul, who is on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

The two men initially talked about long-standing issues, notably Tehran’s nuclear program, and also recent flare-ups in the Persian Gulf, according to the sources. In May and June, the United States accused Tehran of sabotaging six oil tankers just beyond the strategic Strait of Hormuz. On June 20th, Iran shot down one of America’s most sophisticated drones, claiming that it was flying over Iranian airspace. Trump considered military retaliation, but called it off at the last minute, because of projected casualties. While Zarif was in New York, the U.S. downed an Iranian drone, on July 18th. As tempers frayed, Washington was abuzz with worry about the prospect of a new war in the Middle East. Paul’s mission was to break through the messy layers of conflict and launch a direct diplomatic channel, at the highest level. The overture was a miniature version of Trump’s tactic in circumventing traditional diplomacy by dealing directly with the North Korean leadership.

During an hour-long conversation, Zarif offered Paul ideas about how to end the nuclear impasse and address Trump’s concerns. He later outlined some of them to our group of journalists and subsequently in more detail to me. “As a diplomat, I have to always think about alternatives,” he told us. Among them was the idea that the Iranian Parliament could codify, in law, a fatwa issued by Iran’s Supreme Leader, originally in 2003 and again in 2010, that forbids the production or use of nuclear weapons. “We consider the use of such weapons as haraam [forbidden] and believe that it is everyone’s duty to make efforts to secure humanity against this great disaster,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said, in 2010.

But, if Trump wanted more, he would also have to offer more, Zarif suggested. Another possibility was moving forward one of the later steps of the nuclear deal brokered between Iran and the world’s six major powers in 2015—the accord that Trump abandoned in May, 2018. Zarif said that Iran could bring forward ratification of the so-called Additional Protocol, which is currently due to be implemented by 2023—potentially this year. The protocol, which has already been signed and ratified by a hundred and forty-six nations, allows more intrusive international inspections—on both declared and undeclared nuclear sites in member states—in perpetuity. “The Additional Protocol is a crucial means by which the world verifies that Iran is not pursuing nuclear weapons,” Daryl Kimball, the executive director of the Arms Control Association, told me on Friday. “If you don’t trust the Iranians, you want inspections in perpetuity.” By ratifying the protocol, Iran would forfeit one of the so-called sunset clauses in the 2015 deal, which had triggered deep skepticism among Republicans, some Democrats, Israel, and Saudi Arabia. In exchange, Zarif suggested, Trump could go to Congress to lift sanctions on Iran, as originally provided under the 2015 nuclear deal but not ratified in legislation. Both sides would then feel more secure in the commitments sought in the original deal.

Paul proposed that the Iranian diplomat lay out the same ideas to Trump in person. The President, Paul said, had authorized him to extend an invitation to meet in the Oval Office as early as that week, the U.S., Iranian, and diplomatic sources told me. A White House spokesperson declined to comment about the invitation on the record.

Trump has long defied the hawkish members of his staff—particularly his national-security adviser, John Bolton—who have been skeptical about the potential for successful high-level diplomacy with Iran. On Wednesday, a senior Administration official told reporters, in a teleconference briefing, “President Trump has been very open that he is ready to speak to the senior leadership in Tehran and that he has certainly not prevented any of our friends or allies from communicating with them as well.” Trump relayed a message about potential diplomacy to Iran’s Supreme Leader through the Japanese Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, in June. “The President has placed no restrictions on elected officials having conversations with foreign counterparts,” the official said.

During its first two years, the Trump Administration reached out to Iran about possible meetings at least eight times, including twice when Trump and the Iranian President, Hassan Rouhani, were both at the U.N. General Assembly, European and Iranian diplomats told me. One of those requests, relayed through the French President, Emmanuel Macron, in 2017, was made on the same day that Trump railed against Iran at the General Assembly. Trump called the Islamic Republic a corrupt dictatorship whose leaders had turned a wealthy country “into an economically depleted rogue state whose chief exports are violence, bloodshed, and chaos.” Insulted, Rouhani declined the invitation to meet privately.

Zarif told Paul that the decision to meet Trump in the Oval Office was not his to make; he would have to consult with Tehran. He expressed concern that any meeting might end up as little more than a photo op, without substance, the sources told me. Last December, when I interviewed Zarif at the Doha Forum, he said that Tehran wanted more than just a photograph and a two-page document from any future talks—a reference to the limited outcome of Trump’s first summit with the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un, in Singapore last year. “We don’t just do a talk for a photo opportunity and a two-page document,” he said. “We have a hundred-and-fifty-page document,” a reference to the detailed nuclear accord that Trump abandoned.

After his meeting with Paul, Zarif relayed the overture to Iran’s leaders. They did not approve a meeting—at this time. Rouhani is due to attend the U.N. General Assembly next month.

Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican, is reportedly also working with the Administration on Iran, albeit on a different track. He was part of the group that played golf—and discussed Iran—with Trump on July 14th. Graham, who is more hawkish than Paul, has been consulting with allies on the framework of a wider deal, according to the Daily Beast. It would call on Tehran to accept the so-called 123 Agreement, which was outlined in legislation passed in 1954. It imposes nine safeguards on the use of nuclear material—to insure that it is not diverted to make a bomb—in exchange for U.S. coöperation on nuclear technology. The United States has 123 Agreements with forty-nine countries and Taiwan.

“I told the president: Put the 123 on the table with the Iranians. Make them say ‘no,’ ” Graham told the Daily Beast. “I think the Iranians will say no. And I think that will force the Europeans’ hands.” Since Trump abandoned the 2015 nuclear deal, the United States and Europe have split more deeply over Iran than on any other issue since the forging of a Western alliance after the Second World War. Britain, France, and Germany have repeatedly recommitted to the original nuclear deal. In June, they launched a financial mechanism, INSTEX, to help companies circumvent U.S. sanctions if they did business with Iran. As tensions have heightened in the Persian Gulf, long-standing allies have blamed the Administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign in the past fifteen months, blaming the approach for provoking an aggressive Iranian response. Last month, the Europeans either resisted or refused to join Operation Sentinel, a U.S. plan to secure tanker traffic and maritime security in the Gulf, and instead opted to make their own arrangements.

On July 31st, with no breakthrough on the horizon, the Trump Administration sanctioned Zarif for “reprehensible” behavior, for having links to the Revolutionary Guard (which, in April, was designated as a foreign terrorist organization), and for functioning “as a propaganda minister, not a foreign minister.” In the briefing on Wednesday, the senior Administration official said that Zarif “has had this veneer—masquerade, if you will—of being the sincere and reasonable interlocutor for the regime. Our point today is that he is no such thing. We have granted him every courtesy. We have allowed him to exercise the right to free speech that that regime routinely denies to its own citizens.”

Technically, the sanctions mean that the United States can seize any property Zarif holds in the United States, block him from travelling here, and threaten with sanctions any person, company, or financial institution that does business with Zarif. In practical terms, the move may have limited impact. Under the U.N. charter, the United States is obliged, as the host country, to grant travel to diplomats doing business at the global body. The commitment has rarely been violated. Zarif has usually visited the United Nations three or four times a year. Iran’s U.N. mission expects him to attend the U.N. General Assembly next month. The Europeans, meanwhile, volubly protested the move. “We believe all diplomatic channels must remain open, especially in the current state of heightened tensions,” the French Foreign Ministry tweeted.

Zarif used Trump’s favorite medium to respond. “The US’ reason for designating me is that I am Iran’s ‘primary spokesperson around the world,’” Zarif tweeted. “Is the truth really that painful? It has no effect on me or my family, as I have no property or interests outside of Iran. Thank you for considering me such a huge threat to your agenda.”

Paul’s office had no formal comment. “I have to refer you to the tweet,” his press office told me. On his Twitter account, the senator had shared an Associated Press story about the Administration’s move against Zarif, above which he wrote, “If you sanction diplomats you’ll have less diplomacy.”

I don’t understand the point of garden visits. Why do ordinary people, the owners of mere balconies and tiny yards, torment themselves by touring other people’s grand estates? Nut trees, stables, ancestral compost heaps: I need no reminder of what I am missing. So, unlike virtually every other gardener in Britain, I had no intention of spending my summer wandering among aristocratic roses and marvelling at the fine tilth of Lord Whatsit’s sandy carrot beds. All those rambling sweet peas make me furious; yes, Tristram, it is a handsome cardoon bed, but some of us are struggling to find space for a single extra lettuce. And then, wholly by accident, I found myself in the Lost Gardens of Heligan.

How do you lose a garden? We’ve all read Forster, Woolf, and Galsworthy; at least, we’ve watched “Downton Abbey.” We understand the tribulations of the great British country houses as the country creaked into the twentieth century: thieving footmen, deranged ladies’-maids, and troublesome romances between under-butlers. These were the good old days of hand-scissored lawns; labor was cheap, the poor still had caps to doff, and, if the discreet charm of the poshingtons’ comfortable lives depended on scullions washing crystal glasses as dawn broke, at least the natural order was intact. Partridges do need de-boning. Knot gardens don’t prune themselves, you know.

Then everything stopped. It wasn’t only the firm-jawed elder heirs to complicated inheritances who fell, elegantly, during the four long years of the First World War. Hundreds of thousands of ordinary servicemen, and some women, were killed or mutilated at the Somme and Ypres; because they were recruited together, entire villages, households, and families were decimated in a single day. Suddenly, as we Brits still often say, one couldn’t get the staff. The literature of interwar Britain is full of bad food, dirty floors, and surly amateurish cooks and cleaners. Middle-class women learned to do it themselves; high taxation and death duties meant that big houses were divided or sold. But who would look after the gardens?

In 1914, a staff of twenty-three tended the grounds of the Heligan estate, an unremarkable stately home in Cornwall, at the southwestern tip of England. It had belonged to four generations of the Tremayne family, gentlemen plant-enthusiasts; if you think your modest garden takes a lot of work, imagine hundreds and hundreds of acres of rarities. There were fan-trained peaches and melon yards to maintain, delicate tropical trees to swaddle, famous camellias and rhododendrons and, behind it all, out of sight, a complex and labor-intensive infrastructure of rainwater gulleys, sawmills, and steam-powered greenhouse heaters. By the end of the war, nine Heligan men—gardeners and laborers—were dead.

Who now had time to look after any garden, particularly one on the scale of Heligan? It grew unkempt, then neglected, and, when the property’s childless squire moved to Italy, in 1923, abandoning his monkey puzzles, tree ferns, and magnolias to a series of uninterested tenants, the Georgian Ride, the Mushroom House, and Grotto were quickly forgotten.

Even the most casual gardener knows how quickly cultivated plants can run amok. In my favorite American children’s book, “McBroom’s Wonderful One-Acre Farm,” by Sid Fleischman, poor farmers are saved by the absurdly pumped-up fertility of their tiny smallholding. I always think of that story when I’m in Cornwall, a peculiar, beautiful place full of underpopulated corners where history lies almost ignored and where, thanks to its microclimate of soft rain and warm breezes, every hedgerow is a rampaging orgy of plant life. At Heligan, the soil was manured, aerated, and assiduously double dug for centuries; plants must have been queuing at the gates. Imagine the thick, wet, fertile quiet, coupled with that delicious dirt: precious specimens, left to their own devices, silently gorging, seedlings and weeds running wild. Within weeks, the paths would have been entangled with bramble and honeysuckle, the herb garden strangled with bindweed. For decades, Heligan grew untamed.

Then, in the nineteen-nineties, a new owner, a distant Tremayne, was exploring the jungle when he discovered a door in a wall and gradually uncovered not only a sophisticated and beautiful garden beneath the wilderness but the remnants of a world frozen on the edge of terrible change. There was a half-filled bucket of coal waiting to fire the steam-powered boiler. Young men, about to go to war, had written their names in pencil on the whitewashed walls of the Thunderbox Room; there was a pets’ graveyard, a pioneering kiwi-fruit vine, a head gardener’s tea kettle, and a pineapple pit, heated with fresh manure.

After an intensive restoration process, involving plant uncovering, well rejuvenation, and debates about the authenticity of electrical heating, the gardens were opened to the public: not as another impressive estate but as a First World War “living memorial” recognized by the Imperial War Museum, in London. Now any ignorant city-dweller can nod knowledgeably at the charcoal burner and beehives, admire the Technicolor banks of dahlias in the cutting garden, and covet—in my case, quite violently—the brass watering cans and elaborate glasshouses, with their beaver-tail glazing and delicious levers. The urban farmer within each of us can thrill to the smell of freshly sawn tree trunks, to cogs and pulleys, icehouses and watercourses. But the point of Heligan is archeology, not nostalgia; in some ways, it is the perfect antidote to garden envy. It’s full of walls of bee boles, cobbles, and potting sheds: a beautiful monument to hard work, anonymous labor, and shattered innocence. And it will break your heart.