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All you need to do is a bit of beachcombing and you’ll find things like the sea bean, the horse-eye bean – and this, the delightfully named nickar nut. All of them are seeds, but unlike anything Alan Titchmarsh grows in the garden! For hundreds of years people attached all sorts of folklore to these strange objects; they could be used for anything from curing the pain of childbirth to preventing baldness. The reason we’re not familiar with these seeds is that they’re not native to Britain, so where have they come from? Well, the alternative name of the sea bean gives you a clue - its other name is the monkey ladder vine. This little chap has come all the way from the Amazon. This plant grows along the banks of tropical rivers. Its seeds are dispersed by water and usually germinate further downstream. But if they don’t drift ashore, they eventually find themselves in the sea where they are swept away by one of the world’s great ocean currents - the Gulf Stream. Once in its powerful grip these tropical seeds are carried across the North Atlantic to our western shores. But this current also brings with it something far more valuable to our islands; heat. Its waters wrap Britain in a warm, wet blanket; insulating us from the worst effects of our northerly position. At the far southwest corner of Britain lie the Isles of Scilly. And here you can really see the impact of this warm current. In the summer it looks and feels more like the Bahamas. Frosts are unheard of and palm trees can easily survive the northern winter. Gardening down here is a dream and our resident birds find themselves in a kaleidoscopic world of sub-tropical blooms.