Bowler hats and potting sticks
As head gardeners enjoy a renaissance, Steven Desmond digs into their history and gets some modern-day examples to spill the beans on the best and the worst of the job
Steven Desmond digs into the history of the head gardener and speaks to the modern incarnations
The office of head gardener has been with us a very long time. Adam, the father of us all, was put into the Garden of eden ‘to dress it and keep it’ and no one blames him for the subsequent events. In 1804, Sir Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society, said that he knew of ‘no trade that conceals so many branches of knowledge as that of a gardener’.
This is an abiding truth, although not universally acknowledged, and the modern head gardener continues to command the wide range of scientific, technical, artistic and practical skills needed to cultivate all that we admire in the flower and kitchen garden.
Banks was speaking during a golden age for the professional gardener, as the craft raised its standards across the board. By the mid 19th century, the head gardener was of equal status on the private estate with the butler and the farm bailiff and presided over a staff descending in rank order from himself, through the various departmental foremen and journeymen, to the improvers and pot-boys, right down to the fresh-faced Saturday lad of all work.
The apprenticeship was long and demanding and the best contenders could expect to work in several different establishments before earning the right to walk round inspecting with watch, bowler hat and potting stick. The Victorian head gardener lived in a comfortable estate house, perhaps built into the corner of the kitchen-garden wall, and was often to be seen in the big house creating those illustrious floral table decorations required for every great occasion. efficiency and presentation were his watchwords.
The most famous of all Victorian head gardeners was Joseph Paxton, one of the most dynamic characters in a golden age of practical action. Appointed to the post at Chatsworth on a whim by the 6th Duke of Devonshire, Paxton arrived on the roof of the coach from London in the small hours of the morning, climbed over the 12ft kitchen-garden wall, met his startled new staff as they arrived for the day’s work, successfully proposed to his future wife after meeting her for the first time over breakfast ‘and thus completed my first morning’s work before nine o’clock’.
The working life of the estate gardener was perfectly summed up in Rudyard Kipling’s poem The Glory of the Garden, published in 1911. I first saw this as a yellowing cardboard copy hanging on the wall of the potting shed of a garden in York where I worked as a young man. It immediately brought to mind the immaculate world of the edwardian garden, invisibly maintained in perfect order apparently by the fairies:
Our England is a garden , and such gardens are
By the mid 19th century, the head gardener was of equal status on the private estate with the butler and the farm bailiff
not made By singing ‘Oh, how beautiful!’ and sitting in the shade While better men than we go out and start their working lives At grubbing weeds from gravel-paths with
broken dinner-knives. This well-regulated era continued more or less unabated until 1914, with a typical head gardener surveying an empire of glittering glasshouses, rows of seasonal vegetables, trained fruit, immaculate lawns and endless tip-top borders. The decline had been coming for some years, however, and, after 1945, the gardener in private service increasingly turned, like Percy Thrower, to the municipal parks departments for a more secure future.
In modern times, the head gardener, far from fading gently into sepia-toned history, has enjoyed something of a renaissance. There are several reasons for this. Some estates still carry on in the old way, employing a squadron of gardeners under the necessary leadership. Others retain a ‘gardener-in-charge’ with seasonal and specialist assistance as required.
Many more, especially those in some form of institutional curatorship, adapt the old system by invoking a selection of paid staff, college students on work placement
and that uniquely British phenomenon, the volunteer. The diverse nature of this varied workforce brings its own special challenges.
Today’s head gardener has thus to be a more adaptable creature than the grandee of old, managing a garden often as much for the approval of the fleeting visitor as for that of the owner and coaxing specialist skills out of staff from many different backgrounds.
The traditional disciplines of plantsmanship, practical skill, meticulous planning and the ability to respond to unpredictable challenges will always remain, but the modern entrant sometimes comes from an unconventional background.
School careers officers are sometimes unable to distinguish in their minds between gardening as a hobby and horticulture as a profession, so that some head gardeners come to their posts by circuitous routes.
All of them, however, share the experience of working in a job in which there is so much to learn that it would be impossible ever to know everything.
For further information, consult the Professional Gardeners’ Guild (www. pgg.org.uk) and the Chartered Institute of Horticulture (www.horticulture.org.uk)
Sarah Wain, Head gardener at West Dean, West Sussex
Some gardens, it is true, give the visitor the impression that nothing has changed since the old queen died and that the affairs of the modern world are no more than a little local difficulty. One of these is the West Dean estate near Chichester, where the kitchen garden is of such miraculous order and beauty that Lord Grantham must surely stroll through it at any moment.
In fact, the Edward James Foundation runs the whole place as an Arts-based educational charity and the garden is run not by one head gardener, but by two. Sarah Wain, one half of this unconventional but perfect arrangement (Jim Buckland is the other), shatters the rest of our crusty illusions by not only being female, but also by being Australian. Her workforce includes an unwieldy army of 45 volunteers in addition to the core professional staff and student trainee.
Sarah’s particular care is for the superlative displays in the glasshouses
Much of her time is taken up with showing enthusiasts round this wonderland of excellence and her particular care is for the superlative displays in the glasshouses overflowing (in orderly fashion) with fruit, salads, ferns and pot plants of every kind.
‘I gardened as a child and my parents, both doctors, encouraged us to find a vocation, so I did,’ she explains. ‘Jim and I came here in 1991, straight after the two catastrophic storms, and gradually set about putting things right.’
How on earth the garden will get on when Sarah and Jim retire in March is perhaps one of those mysterious concepts. It’s certainly beyond me, but life, and West Dean, must go on.
Favourite bit of the job The life in the open air, the endless diversity of the work, and the pleasure of seeing elaborate plans come, literally, to fruition.
Biggest bugbear The endless maintenance of all those period glasshouses and her occasional vexation at being unable to communicate complex ideas to certain individuals. That, I think, is their loss.
01243 811301; www.westdean.org.uk ‘At West Dean: The Creation of an Exemplary Garden’ by Jim Buckland and Sarah Wain is published by White Lion
Michael Walker, head gardener, Trentham Gardens, Staffordshire
Michael Walker presides as head gardener and, nowadays, head of pretty well everything else at Trentham Gardens on the outskirts of Stoke-on-trent. This was anciently the seat of the Dukes of Sutherland, but was abandoned by them in 1912 as industrialisation encroached. Now, the remains of the Charles Barry house overlook an astonishingly regenerated vision of the famous garden.
Its Victorian geometry is no longer filled with seasonal bedding, but with herbaceous planting in the modern style, much of it designed by such luminaries as Tom Stuartsmith, Piet Oudolf and Nigel Dunnett.
Michael began as a disillusioned youth in Belfast, but training in horticulture at CAFRE’S Greenmount campus transformed his outlook and he’s never looked back. Spells in charge at Harewood House and Waddesdon Manor (where he worked with Oscar de la Renta) both involved the revival of magnificent 19th-century parterres, so he must have seemed the obvious choice for his present post.
As a gardener at the top of his profession, Michael is keen to bring on the next generation
As a gardener at the top of his profession, Michael is keen to bring on the next generation. He’s a leading figure in the work of the Professional Gardeners’ Guild, the central body for those who work in this sometimes isolated calling.
Favourite bit of the job ‘The thing I enjoy most is bringing sleeping giants back to life,’ he says. ‘I’m lucky to work with an amazing team of people who share my enthusiasm.’ Biggest bugbear He gets frustrated, as all gardeners do, by difficulties he is powerless to resolve, like being unable to abstract water from the mighty River Trent as it flowed past his bone-dry garden in the scorching summer of 2018. ‘A key part of the job is learning to take the rough with the smooth. You have to accept that it’s a seasonal job, and good gardening will bring results in good time.’ 01782 646646; www.trentham.co.uk
Lachlan Rae, the 26-yearold new incumbent as head gardener on the Wiston House estate, West Sussex
All craft-based professionals, especially those involved with the delicate business of conservation, worry about the future and it might be thought that working out of doors in a remote spot and getting your hands dirty would be anathema to modern youth. There are, happily, many living contradictions to this superficial view, among them Lachlan Rae.
Lachlan’s name was on every gardener’s lips when he won the annual Young Horticulturist of the Year competition organised by the Chartered Institute of Horticulture in 2017. His career began, like Michael Walker’s, a little uncertainly, this time in his native Dumfries, but, once again, college training pointed him in the right direction and victory has been assured ever since.
Lachlan rejoices in the endless variety that the weather and seasons bring
A spell at the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh, a famous launching pad for horticulturists of every description, produced the finished article and now Lachlan finds himself in charge of the grounds at a historic country house.
Like others of his kind, Lachlan rejoices in the endless variety that weather and seasons bring. To anyone thinking of joining the profession, whether a school-leaver or, as is often the case, a career-changer, he’s clear about the prospects and demands that are entailed: ‘I should think there is no other profession that combines such a rich balance of academic knowledge and practical skill.’
Did not the great Sir Joseph Banks say the same himself two centuries ago? Perhaps there’s something in it.
Favourite bit of the job ‘I just love the feeling of walking out in the morning through the gardens of a 500-year-old estate. After a walk through the glasshouses to see how everything’s coming on, I go through the tasks for the day with my staff and we set about it all.’
Biggest bugbear The seemingly endless routine of grasscutting and strimming during the growing season.
01903 815020; https://wistonhouse.co.uk