At home with the guiding light of the National Garden Scheme
For the past decade, George Plumptre has led the National Garden Scheme – and 2020 was a year unlike any other. By Elizabeth Grice
There’s no heart-warming tale from George Plumptre’s boyhood about how he grew to love gardens from watching a broad bean sprout in a bottle or from helping his mother plant lupins in the herbaceous borders of Goodnestone Park (the family home). The chief executive of the National Garden Scheme struggles to remember a single moment of horticultural awakening. No. He and his four brothers were too busy rampaging through the neglected thickets of their estate in Kent, climbing the ancient cedar of Lebanon or roller-skating along the top floor of the Palladian country house to pay much attention to their mother’s acclaimed garden restoration.
“Most of the things I did in the garden were destructive rather than constructive,” he admits. “My brothers and I were riotous. A lot of the time it was bedlam. Chunks of the garden were completely overgrown and impenetrable, so ideal for real exploration. My mother, who was a concert pianist, longed for one of her five sons to be a musician, but it was no good. We were always on the farm or in the garden.”
The house had been requisitioned by the army during the war and was in a state of advanced dereliction when Plumptre’s parents, the 21st Baron FitzWalter and his wife Margaret moved there in 1955. It was an eyesore of Nissen huts, concrete and barbed wire. Renovations had hardly got going when the house was almost destroyed by fire. During the panic to rescue art works, someone remembered that three-year-old George was having his midday nap. He was brought to safety by his nanny.
Despite the setback, by the 1970s, the 15-acre garden was attracting attention as one of the loveliest in Kent, and Margaret FitzWalter, a self-taught gardener of legendary hospitality and drive, had started to open it to the public through the NGS.
In what seems now like a prophetic gesture, the teenage Plumptre would cycle down the village lanes with yellow NGS signs under his arm, looking for a prime spot to display them to attract visitors to Goodnestone. And that was about the extent of his early interest.
Against a background of birdsong and pruning saws, we meet in his adoptive garden, Eccleston Square, Pimlico, to talk about his game-changing decade as head of the organisation that raises more than £3million a year for nursing and healthcare charities from its garden open days. In that time, Plumptre has modernised and refreshed the NGS, put new heart into its army of volunteers and brought to national attention the health benefits of gardening and garden visiting, through commissioning the influential King’s Fund report.
“Glorious George”, they call him in the garden world. Rachel de Thame, the gardener and television presenter, rates him as a national treasure, “a genuinely unforgettable person who manages to combine seemingly incompatible character traits: he’s charm personified yet utterly determined, open to new ideas yet reassuringly old school.”
There’s certainly a whiff of the gentlemanly adventurer about Plumptre, as though he might have strayed out of a John Buchan novel. He reminds Christopher Woodward, director of The Garden Museum, of the secret agent John Steed in The Avengers. “When you bump into George on the platform at Victoria, you never know if he’s just back from lecturing on rose gardens in Faversham, or from having parachuted into Occupied France.”
Plumptre’s infectious optimism and his knack of flexible thinking was crucial in lockdown, when 3,500 private gardens had to remain shut for several months and the NGS was faced with a huge shortfall in funds – 80 per cent of the money it distributes each year comes from admissions, teas and cake.
“I thought, right: you’ve got to come up with a plan, get the message out there, keep everybody on side, make sure you’ve got a clear line of direction, don’t dither. You must always give the impression that you know what you’re doing.”
With a heavy heart, he rang the beneficiaries – Macmillan Cancer Support, Marie Curie, Hospice UK and The Queen’s Nursing Institute – to explain personally that they would not be receiving the money they were expecting.
“It was the moment when all of their fundraising was collapsing,” he says.
“But their services were more in demand because nurses were on the front line. There were some hard conversations.”
At speed, but not sure it would work, Plumptre and his team devised ways to keep up morale as well as funds. Virtual garden tours, for a donation, were an astonishing success and brought British gardens to an international audience. There were online lectures. Garden owners raised £120,000 with plant stalls at their gates and many gave donations in lieu of what they would have raised by opening. By the end of the year, the NGS was able to distribute almost as much money as in normal times. “In his quiet, gentle way”, says Lynda Thomas, chief executive of Macmillan, “he’s unbelievably effective.”
Wyndham George Plumptre (pronounced “plum tree”), 65, arrived at his dream job in middle age. After Radley and Cambridge, where he read history, his first job was with a publishing house, editing The World of Cricket. He then wrote two cricket books of his own. With no horticultural credentials except a late-flowering interest in gardens, he embarked on a nationwide tour of lesser-known gardens – 200 of them – for the Collins Book of British Gardens (1985). “The gardeners I met along the way knew that I knew nothing,” he says, “but they were generous in educating me.”
From this springboard, he went on to produce a spate of well-received gardening books and articles, interrupted by two spells of work for the auction houses, Sotheby’s (in South Africa) and Bonhams. From 1993 to 1996, he was gardening correspondent for The Times and also wrote for Country Life. “Some of my early articles in Country Life are almost indigestible,” he says, “because I was determined that everybody should know how much I knew about plants. Everything was about the knowledge.
“Now I’m much more interested in the gardens and the people, the impact a garden has on the person who made it; what it means to them in a non-horticultural way. Out of that, I’ve begun to realise the impact gardens can have not only on people’s health, but their approach to life and their general feeling of well-being and contentment.”
In 2009, he paused his career to undergo treatment to give a kidney to his youngest brother, Francis, whose second transplant from an anonymous donor had begun to fail.
“In a group of siblings,” he explains, “it is possible there will be a perfect match, and if there is, it will be the only one. I was the perfect match. Frankly, I drew the short straw. It would have been churlish to refuse.”
Afterwards, he noticed a subtle change in his relationship with Francis. “Subconsciously, there is a different affinity. It takes a bit of time to sink in.
‘If you had an allotment in Sunderland, he’d make you feel as good as if it was Hatfield House’
‘I’ve realised the impact gardens have, not only on people’s health but their approach to life’
The whole experience is slightly bewildering. I realised he would not have had long life without it.”
Plumptre is down-to-earth, unstuffy and renowned for “putting in a stint”.
He and his second wife, Annabel, have spent countless weekends nurturing NGS garden owners and volunteers up and down the country. “He’s genuinely interested in people and their gardens,” says Woodward. “If you had an allotment in Sunderland, he’d make you feel as good as if you were opening Hatfield House.”
Each year, he insists on shadowing a Queen’s Nurse for a day, going into patients’ homes, so he can understand the job. “That is an amazing commitment,” says Dr Crystal Oldman, head of the Queen’s Nursing Institute. “He’s not in the least bit precious.”
Briefly, he was one of a group of wellborn young men who hung out with Lady Diana Spencer and her flatmates at Coleherne Court. On the day Lady Diana’s engagement to the Prince of Wales was announced, Plumptre had been due to take her to the ballet at Covent Garden. “She sent me a note saying she was going to be otherwise engaged.” He politely declines all requests to talk about those days, but reflects: “It was hard to see how things turned out for her.”
Plumptre and his first wife, Alexandra (“Rara”), divorced in 2008. They have three grown-up children: Wyndham has a management consultancy, Piers is a lawyer with an American company and Hermione, an athlete, is a personal trainer in Berlin.
Plumptre himself is grateful to be doing a job he loves when so many of his contemporaries have, as he puts it, “fallen off the employment merry-goround”. “I’ve no illusions about how lucky I am. And if you’re lucky enough to be in work, you’ve got a lot to give by the time you get to my age.”