“It’s a special garden in a special place”
Curator Mike Nelhams shares his excitement for this unique plant collection
Mike has been Curator at Tresco for 24 years. He heads up a team of nine, three of which are students on scholarships offered by the Studley College Trust. Among the six permanent staff is a head gardener, a propagator and a productive gardener; the rest of the team work in the main garden.
How did you come to be Curator at the Abbey Garden? I first came here from RHS Wisley as a student in 1976 for 12 months, but I was so delighted with the place I got them to keep me on for another two years. I came back to Tresco in 1984 as head gardener. Gradually I found I was doing jobs such as plant collection lists and writing articles that were a bit more than the head gardener role, so 10 years ago my role changed to curator.
Is this garden linked with similar ones? I visited Kew Gardens back in September because they’ve just replanted the temperate house and had some surplus plants. There aren’t many gardens in Britain where plants from Kew’s temperate glasshouse will actually grow outside! The curator of Kings Park Botanic Gardens in Perth, Western Australia, visited last year and as a result we’ve grown on 65 different species of banksia. We also have links with Kirstenbosch and Stellenbosch in South Africa and Longwood Gardens in Philadelphia in America. The garden survives and grows thanks to these links.
Can you tell us about the New Year flower count? It started as a gentle bit of fun. On New Year’s Day, some of the gardening team aren’t quite awake, but my Head Gardener Andrew Lawson is very keen and records everything in his notebook. Because most of our plants come from the southern hemisphere, a lot of them f lower as if they were in a southern hemisphere summer, which means they bloom for us from November to late February. The 2018 flower count recorded 350 different species in f lower on New Year’s Day – plants such as proteas (pictured below), acacias, aloes and pelargoniums.
What makes the plant collection so unusual? It’s unique. Some gardens can grow plants from New Zealand, and others the tender plants from South Africa and the Canaries, but what they can’t do is grow them all in one place. Because of the way microclimates have been created in the garden we can grow plants that require significant rainfall and plants that need hardly any.
Why do you love it here? It’s a very special garden in a very special place. We always make sure we take visitors to the top terrace so they can see out across the sea because the relationship with the sea is so important. If you picked up the garden and put it in the middle of a wood in England it wouldn’t have the same impact.