Tall tales and true: of Yorkshire moors and the byways of Surrey: Under the oak trees

The next afternoon the group of us headed off to the Royal Horticultural Society's garden at Wisley, one of the main attractions in this part of Surrey.

A hundred and more years ago it was a rural farm property with a wood, called Glebe Farm. The gardens became the retirement brainchild of George Wilson, the son of a Russian candlemaker and a Scottish homemaker, who lived his early life in Wandsworth Common. George followed his father into candle making. He very likely made candles that Charles Dickens used, so close were they in proximity. But over many decades he experimented with different fats and oils and came up with a cheaper, cleaner version of oil for burning than tallow. He was successful. He made a fortune. Then, he sold his creation. But, he went on to discover, through a process of similar research, how to purify glycerine, which made him an even larger fortune. George, with his experimental penchant, retired to a 60 acre property in Wisley in Surrey, where he devoted himself to learning how to help difficult plants thrive. His property, now known as Wisley Gardens, was eventually bequeathed to the RHS and is one of their five show gardens in England.

The weather started out wet today, but the afternoon, thankfully, was mostly dry with patches of sunlight peeking through helping to display the colours in all the garden spaces. The gardens now occupy a much larger site, but the experimental work continues with some 90 full time gardeners now employed, we were told, and training in horticulture continues there with plans afoot for expansion.

Bec and I hunted for Kate Middleton's Back to Nature Garden to no avail. A few things were closed, though, and some areas were off limits because of the water underfoot from earlier rain, so maybe that garden was one of them, although we saw no signs for it, either. It is also possible that it is still too new to cope with hoards of visitors. Instead, we visited canal gardens, walled and rock gardens, wisteria and rose gardens, and gardens with border and exotic plantings. My favourite, though, was the Oakwood, which was large and quite magical, with tiny plants clustered under the trunks of trees of immense height.

We have been starting our days with a coffee shop call, and we finish by hunting down a quaint pub offering a pint of interesting ale before dinner. Then home we head to cook. With everyone pitching in this tends to be a real group effort and, as a result, we've had some delicious feasts. Tonight we had the added bonus of fresh chestnuts, finely skinned, that we'd harvested from the wet ground beneath the chestnut trees at the gates of Wisley gardens. Thank you, George. We might return when we finish this crop as so many were falling there. It may even be a place for prized truffles. It certainly was for colourful mushrooms.