Day 43 - Abuse of authority

I promised you quite a long time ago that I would show you the story of our summer bedding schemes. And who is to say I won't. Just not today.

Today I have decided to aim at bringing to a conclusion the history of staffing the property under my management. The moulding of the existing helpers, the employment of new ones, the direction of our presentational philosophy. All these are tied up with the people and their roles.

First, let me say that we couldn't live with a garden shed as our Visitor Reception area. I expect most of you have seen how it is done these days, with multi-million pound architect-designed buildings, in some cases outdoing the actual property as buildings of interest.

Well, we were starting from a different budgetary position. We had a shed and no money. We also had drive and enthusiasm which was not matched by our resources. After a couple of years of nagging, I managed to secure £2000 to have a plywood structure built, ostensibly to replicate one of the garden buildings. It turned out that the roof was too complicated to copy for the price, so we ended up with a poor compromise, but we did place it in a better position. Right by the cattle grid where we could watch the kids cramming themselves between the bars. The advantage the structure had over its predecessor was that it had storage space, and looked a bit brighter. Architecturally, it was no masterpiece. The building it was based on looked like this -

The place in action was more like this -

Staff enjoying themselves? Whatever next?

However, there was one other staff problem which had to be addressed. I needed help. It became very clear that trying to combine running the garden and the property was going to spread me too thinly and put my credibility at risk. I nagged about this too. My first boss here was, is, a lovely man, who desperately wanted to help, but had no money to offer, so it took a while of constant pressure to wear him down. In the end he permitted me admin help of five hours a week, to be provided by a friend of his who fitted it in around looking after her kids. I never really knew when she would be there, but any help was welcome. Unfortunately she moved away after her first season, and I was left with a hole again. This proved fortunate, in that I was able to get the hours increased to ten a week, prior to advertising the post. Ultimately, over a period of years these increased to, I believe, twenty-five. The interviews took the form of a one-to-one with me, and a typing test on the electric typewriter. I ended up employing the candidate who broke the typewriter, on the grounds that she was less barmy than all the others.

This appointment proved fortuitous, as she turned out to be an extremely capable person who grew quickly and magnificently into the role, eventually relieving me of some of the stresses of being two different human beings at the same time. Ultimate responsibility remained mine, but at last we had a presentable front-of-house face that satisfied the requirements of those who were too snobby to deal with me. Of course, we had very different ways of doing things, and I know that we infuriated each other on numerous occasions, but the fact was that despite our different outlooks and approaches, we both shared a commitment to the property, based, I think, on the need to make the best of the quirks and local idiosyncracies of the place, its history and personnel. I became confident that I could be absent for periods without it all falling apart, and that when I returned, what I found would be recognisably what I had left behind. She did much to help develop the property as a whole, and took on some of the responsibility for the volunteers in the house, and, importantly, for the inventory of contents and the schedules of restoration for furniture and artefacts, as well as many other things. Knowing that she remains a very private person, there will be no photograph shown here. When she started, we shared a tiny office which we soon outgrew. We removed all the gardening equipment from he engine house into a workshop built by the organisation's in-house carpenter, and colonised the whole space as an office, which we had plastered and painted. I remained in the grubby end with the gardeners' mess-room, while my assistant gravitated up one step into a larger carpeted area, where she sat imperiously surveying allcomers from on high. Small wonder that many of our new volunteers thought she was my boss, and not the other way round. No matter. Those things aren't important. Getting the job done was paramount. Egos had to be sacrificed.

As I have indicated, we were really very different people, and I know she used to despair when she looked at my desk, heaped as it was with unattended paperwork (I left everything till cold days in the winter), gardening tools, nuts, bolts, plumbing items and lunch. She was very orderly, with a tidy desk, and always able to find things on the computer when required. In my defence, I also knew what I was doing. I just didn't feel the compulsion to look as if I did.

The difference between the two of us was in line with my declared policy of encouraging diversity in the workforce, so that with luck all visitors could find someone to relate to. It was certainly a strength which helped us to achieve more than we could have if we had all been the same. Sadly the business of historic houses and gardens failed to attract much multi-ethnic or age-related diversity, and our visitors and team as a whole were predominantly white, middle-class and ageing. I hope that is changing now.

When she moved on to a new challenge ten or so years later, I promoted our Visitor Services Manager to replace her. It is fascinating how one person's organisation is another's chaos. We couldn't find a thing amongst the computer filing, and had to reorganise it into a form we understood. I expect the people who came after me did the same to my work. That's the nature of it. My new helper was a fine lady, and having found myself alone after more than quarter of a century as part of a family, I relaxed my stern professional persona and began to look upon her as a person rather than a valued member of staff. This eventually led to her becoming my wife a few years down the line. She is sticking with it so far. You might call it an abuse of authority. She's the one on he right in the picture above, having too much fun. I don't care what you think.

Day 42 a - An addendum

A while back when I was on the subject of topiary, and gardening being a performing art, I was unable to find the necessary photos to back up what I was saying. A flash of inspiration led me to a drawer in my recently reorganised study -

where I found a number of photos which I had missed when I had a massive scanning session over several months in 2011 while recovering from an accident. Among them was the one of my late recruiting mentor which I have shown today. I was surprised to find also the following three, donated to me by a visitor. They show my wielding my tool with considerable dexterity under the intent gaze of a spectator. QED.

I genuinely used to love doing that.

Day 42 - Fast shirts

Before I can get on with telling you more about the garden, there is one further area of the work I had to familiarise myself with, and that was our admissions procedure. I needed to find out what went on in the old shed next to the drive in which we greeted visitors and tried to sell them membership packages.

For a start, it was obvious that it was a pretty scruffy approach to the property, to be greeted by a domestic garden building amongst the subdued evergreen sweep that concealed the house and the rest of the garden from view. Subtly planned, so that it all revealed itself suddenly as you reached the corner, and it felt like the sun had come out.

We had a number of staff who worked in our kiosk, all paid low seasonal wages, and who were mostly involved as paid volunteers, because you certainly couldn't make a living at it, either on the wages we were offering or on the hours available. Tuesdays were staffed by one couple who always came together, and seemed to me to be the ideal that I wanted  in the role. They always dressed colourfully but tastefully. (Not Michael Portillo in his national flags of the world jacket and trousers ensembles). They looked bright, and their demeanour was bright. They were the nicest people you could imagine. In this case nice was good. You don't need extreme descriptors for kiosk staff. You want people that everybody likes. When the husband of this pair died, his funeral filled the Cathedral. That's how nice you need to be. Fine people. They set the standard I tried to repeat with every future appointment. In this I was not always successful.

There were also other reception staff who were not so good, and after failing over a prolonged period to stimulate improvements through sensitive management, including home visits offering psychological support, I was forced in the end to be robust and put an end to the collective distress. I hate being robust. I hate being a manager. I want everybody to get along. And like any of us, I just want to be loved. But, come on, that's a naïve approach to management. In the end someone always wants to depose the king. So, robust it was. As infrequently as I could.

The other person involved in Visitor Reception was a more regular employee, responsible for Membership Recruitment. Membership is more beneficial to the organisation than ticket sales, because it encourages repeat visits, so in the target-driven world I had just unwittingly entered, membership sales were paramount. A lot of properties had a bad reputation for press-ganging people into joining, and I was desperate to avoid anything which might put people off favouring us with a visit, so I declared this to our man at the gate. His response was, 'watch me'. He was an ex vacuum-cleaner and brush salesman, which you might imagine would signify aggressive door-to-door practices, leading with the front foot to ensure nothing gets slammed in the face. He was interesting to watch. He met people on entry, let them buy their ticket, and didn't try to sell them anything. He never mistakenly approached anybody who was already a member, but he noted carefully who wasn't. Some of these he would engage in pleasant conversation about something completely different, and they would go off round the garden having had a pleasant greeting. But he had their face in his memory, and on the way out he would speak to them again, asking if they had enjoyed their visit, and so gradually leading them round to the benefits of membership. He made most of his sales on the basis of offering the benefits to people who had already been hooked by what we had to give. This became the approach which I adopted for all future employees. It was also the reason why it was so important to me that all staff and volunteers should be friendly and welcoming. We all had to work together to achieve results. A year or so later, I can't be precise, we received an award for being the most improved small property for Membership Recruitment, a small property being one with below a certain number of visitors.

Our Recruiter took me under his wing, and resolved to teach me all he knew. Sales wasn't my thing. I needed all the help I could get. We didn't agree on everything, however. I was a gardener and dressed accordingly. He thought that when we were open I should look like a manager, and bought me two ties with the organisation's logo on them. I never wore them, but it did become clear that visitors needed to know when they were speaking to a person with authority, so I arrived at an uneasy compromise. I began to change after lunch into clean clothes, but my taste wasn't conservatively managerial. I used to wear what I called 'fast' shirts. A visitor was directed to me with a complaint one day, and I dealt with it, thinking that would be the end of the matter. A short while later a letter came in addressed to the Administrator, raising the same complaint, and protesting about having been dealt with by someone who was inappropriately dressed. Of course, the letter came to me. What the hell was I going to do? Well one thing I can do is write a convincing sentence, so I wrote a fobbing-off letter and heard no more about it.

Fast shirt? Not management material.

The trouble was, I just couldn't do the garden work I needed to be busy with, wearing a jacket and tie. And I had well-dressed people doing the front of house work. Eventually I opted for dressing as a gardener and swallowing my pride when uppity visitors looked down their noses at me. I had greater things to worry about.

Day 41 - Lovely gravel, lovely ramp.

Setting up the house for opening was difficult. The building was a private residence, so we had to bring out our paraphernalia each day. We didn't have the luxury of a museum where the ropes and stanchions and druggetts could be permanently placed and left. We also didn't have anywhere in the house to store them, so they had to be loaded up onto a balance-truck (two wheels in the middle, and weight evenly distributed over them - bloody difficult task in a hurry at the end of the day) and pushed through the gravel to our sheds round the back, where the whole caboodle would be stored till the following week. It was most certainly a balancing act. First we removed the home-made wheelchair ramp from the front steps, inverted it and laid it over the handlebars of the truck. It was very heavy, being constructed of marine ply and chicken wire to increase grip. Then we rolled up all the druggetts (that's felt matting to protect the carpets for those who are unfamiliar with the word), and collected the lead-weighted ropes and stanchions, and very carefully we would arrange them on top of the ramp. Last of all would come the desk, behind which our more numerate stewards would sit and greet visitors and sell guidebooks. For simplicity's sake, I stopped them selling postcards and other knickknacks which had cluttered the scene in previous years.

When I had arrived for my interview before taking the job, I had been shown round the house, and was alarmed to see that the hall table at that time was a scruffy trestle table with an old cloth draped over it. This really let down the presentation of the house, being the first piece of furniture the visitors saw, and looked very amateurish, much as similar furnishing in the tea-room at that time also created a poor impression. Whilst checking the inventories during the winter, I had discovered a nice compact desk in the attic which wasn't being used, so I proposed to use that as our Entrance Hall desk. It had the advantage of having two drawers to hold some of our necessary accoutrements. Would you believe that the same people who were prepared to let us open with a trestle table that would have looked more appropriate in a village hall displaying champion marrows, now had objections to my using a Victorian desk in a surrounding of Regency furniture? I had a strategy for dealing with this, and it didn't involve diplomacy. I just ignored them. They hardly ever came to the property anyway, and as long as the visitors were being well-treated, then I felt I was doing my job. I have a suspicion that if I had followed all the instructions I was given, I would have failed to make the property viable, which may just have been the objective. Who knows? It turned out as it did, and there's nothing that can be done to reverse it now. And, finally, I don't think anybody would want to, with hindsight. For that they must in part thank one stubborn bastard who didn't know his place.

Anyway, having loaded up said truck, we then had to force it through six inches of gravel and take it round the back. It usually took three of us to get it started, and two of us to push it, because the gravel was so thick. The same problem inflicted itself on our mowers, which invariably clogged with stone as we tried to shove them through it to reach the front lawn. The fact is, there was actually little wrong with the stone-impregnated tarmac underneath, but the occupants of the house had decided that it would look nicer if there was raked gravel there instead, and had had lorry-loads of it dumped there when nobody was looking. They gave their own gardener, who maintained the walled garden on their behalf, leave to intrude upon our space and rake the new surface. Well, we certainly weren't going to do it, so we didn't argue. After years of negotiations, I eventually gained a concession allowing us to remove some of it to make life easier for us. There was enough spare to fill in the two cattle-grids by the public entrance, with a substantial pile left over. Filling in the grids prevented experimental juveniles jamming themselves up to the buttocks between the bars, making our jobs much less fraught. The cattle were still wary of the obstacle, but kids could only go ankle deep, which meant that we no longer had to fetch pinch-bars to widen the gaps to release them. Although some of them, I would admit, I would gladly have left there in the middle of the road like the last skittle in a bowling alley, rather than allowing them to rampage through the borders with their dads playing hide-and-seek all over our lovely plants. The toddlers who were encouraged by their dads to walk on top of the box hedges had to be forgiven, as they were too young to know any better, but I would happily have embedded the parents in a cattle grid to make the point. Just an aside, but feelings run high when you care.

Lovely gravel, lovely ramp -

Ooh! And look at those climbers! I'll have something to say about them in due course.

Day 40 - Dad's Head

So this is what I wrote on my new word-processing electric typewriter. I remember having trouble formatting the piece. By then we had an Administrative Assistant on the property, and I asked her for advice on the problem, as it was all very new to me. She looked at me as if I was simple, and said 'just delete the space!' Well, to me, then, a space was something that wasn't there, so how could I delete it? I had a lot to learn about the new age we were moving towards. I think I've got it now, though. And the piece is remarkably prescient under the circumstances.

Dad’s Head

Miss Jones said write a story. About your family. With lots of describing words. I want to go out to play. And don’t start your story with “one day” or “once upon a time”, and write proper sentences with full-stops and commas and not too many “ands”. And Katy’s out in the street on her roller skates. I wish I was with her, but dad’s watching me.

My dad has a lovely smile. I’ve seen pictures of it in my mum’s album. He’s got dimples. But I haven’t seen them, not since he stopped shaving a long time ago before I could remember things. He’s got a long beard, my dad, it makes him look like his face is very long, down to his belly which is getting fat, my mum says. He doesn’t look like other people’s dads with skin on their faces, but I’ve asked Katy and she says her dad’s face feels rough at night. When I kiss my dad before I go to bed I rub my face in his beard. It’s soft and warm and smells of him. I like it. It’s called a beard wag. And I bet he’s smiling inside it. My friend Katy thinks he looks like a Bigfoot. I told her she was stupid and you don’t get them in this country and anyway they’re not real even where you do get them, but he’s just as nice and gentle as they are in the movies and he takes me places I’ve never been and brings me back and I’m always safe.

Like when he took me on his bike early in the morning down a country lane. The bike was rusty and it had no rubber on the wheels, no tyres and it made an awful noise on the road. It scared up birds as we rode by and dad was laughing. The front wheel was bent. It made the bike jump every time the wheel went round and it hurt me because I was sitting on the bar across the middle and I complained a lot about being sore and my dad stopped and moved me so it didn’t hurt me so much and it was fun and then it hurt some more.

I think I’ve put too many ands. Miss Jones won’t like that.

Anyway we went off down the road and the sun was sitting on the sea. There was mist floating on the moor. Sometimes I saw a rabbit frightened by our noise sitting up listening and then it ran away through the heather below the clouds where I couldn’t see it any more. Then my dad stopped the bike and I nearly fell off, he lifted me down, lifted me over the fence, we were in the woods, the leaves and twigs under our feet were soft and crackled, the wet mist dripped off the trees and shining cobwebs shaking in the breeze grabbed on to my face. As we walked through the softness of the bluebells a startled toad hopped a single hop and waited while we walked on. The wood grew deeper, the wood grew darker, the moss on the tree trunks became thicker and wetter. It was scary so I asked dad where we were going and he said “it’s a secret”, I said “why?” and he told me because it is a secret place, then there it was, a hole in the trees, the sun pouring through made my damp hair warm, I heard water splashing and leaves rustling above me, I looked up at the sky, at lines of white light flickering through the trees. The light moved like weeds in running water, the strands of it changed places all the time, that’s what my dad said. I know all his words so well, they’re right inside my head, they paint pictures in the dark, they’re always with me even when I’m frightened in the night when the rain tries to make holes in the window-glass and the wind comes under the door to lift the carpet up as if snakes or a thousand tiny worms are crawling there. And when that happens, I am scared, but I have dad’s pictures in my head, like this one of moving lights in the sky, then I look down. I don’t believe what I see, in that dark place a pool of light so bright I blink, my feet nearly standing in the clearest water I have ever seen, a pool of rippling water on a bed of sparkling granite chips, and a granite cliff behind it. The ice-cold water bounces down the cliff and throws itself at me, on to my shoes, my ankle socks, the hem of my cotton dress, on the cold wet moss that I try not to slip on because my dad says so. Look up there he says, up at the sky where the sunlight is waving and the droplets of water are flying through the air, up there in the rainbow, what can you see, what do you think is up there? I can’t see anything dad, just a rainbow, a beautiful rainbow and little droplets falling slowly, very slowly in the sun. And come with me he says, we’re going to see what lies above the rainbow, what there is behind the sun. Then he takes me under the arms, lifts me onto the rocks and I can climb, and I am safe with him behind me. As we go up sometimes I slip but I have no fear. The water in the air wets our faces, I know I’ve reached the rainbow but I can’t see it any more, or the ground beneath us, so we keep on climbing and the cold moist breeze grows warmer and drier, the mist has cleared, one last push dad says and you’ll be there. My fingers are clutching grass, soft, untrodden grass, dad says, there is brown, crumbling soil in my hands and the grasshopper is chirping in the green. One pull up and I turn. I’m lying on my belly looking over the edge, here comes my dad, his hair all wet and dirty marks on his face. I bet he’s smiling. Then he’s up here with me, his arm is round my shoulders, we are laughing, then we’re serious.

My dad’s not serious much, he mostly jokes and tells me stories, but I am sometimes, when I look at him, or think about him. I’m not sure, but he might be asleep there, across the table, I can still hear Katy on her roller-skates, can I have a drink dad, I’m sure he smiled. I’ll pour myself some orange juice.

Down below us were the trees. We could see the tops of them way down below, the pines, the birch, the ivy climbing. Far beyond the sun floated above the sea like a big ball bouncing, but it looked so small, the sky lit up with shiny colours shivering, in patches down there the mist clung to the treetops, I said to dad just like candy floss on your beard when we took you to the fair and you couldn’t wipe it off.

We sat a long time watching before we turned round to look at the place we had climbed to. We were sitting on lush green grass. Worms and beetles burrowed beneath us in the good earth, behind us stretched fertile plains till we could see no further, dotted with orchards, apples and peaches, orange groves, great teeming rivers heavy with fish, tall beasts browsing in the trees and short ones chewing grass, and everywhere the sound of birdsong and the whisper of distant children laughing, that’s what dad said, and when we turned back and looked over the treetops down below, the sun was a cold evening red sitting on the sea and this is what god must feel like on a good day is what dad said.

And I said yes but I miss my mum when she’s not here. Dad smiled, a bit, I think, we climbed back down, it was dark at the bottom, you carried me dad, when I was tired, when I was scared, and the bike had no tyres, and the bike had no lights and every turn of the wheel must have hurt but I didn’t notice because you were bringing us back to mum and I was safe with you and your words.

Do you think I could go out and play now dad? I’ve done a lot of work and I think Katy’s still out there with her skates. But mum shouts come on you two, come and get your tea, so I push dad down the ramp into the kitchen. I take him places too, but not like the places he takes me, and he thanks me with his mouth full. I’m sure he smiles while I feed him and mum puts her arms around me. And I know he thinks I’m lucky with my legs and arms, but aren’t we lucky too, mum, that his head still works?

And I know dad smiled. I could see it in his eyes.

Dad's Head

Day 39 - Anyone for tea?

Anybody out there enjoy drawing up rotas? Not many of us, I shouldn't wonder. It was a job I was dreading - filling seven slots for Room Stewards twice a week for six months, plus as many Garden Stewards as I could convince to take on the job. Fortunately, I got lucky here too. The Tea-room Manager had been putting in regular appearances even though we had been closed for six months. I think she was checking up on me, like she did with all her employees. I think that's how she saw me, anyway. But she had an idea. Her tea-room was a very ad-hoc affair at that time, only recently taken over from the WI which had run it at the start. Old trestle tables and Baby Burco boilers. Her staff still included some helpers from that source, one of whom was very dynamic, and who was good with people, so she suggested I approach her for help. A gift from the sky. This lady organised my rotas for most of my time there, until she died, when I had to find someone else. As we never got all the volunteers together during the closed season, all of this work had to be done on the phone. You can imagine how laborious that was, getting the schedule filled in the first place, then dealing with amendments as the season went on. Nor did it get simpler with time, as our volunteer contingent increased year on year, finishing on well over 100 by the time I left. The job also involved fitting in my requirements which grew as time went on. These included finding duties for those who couldn't stand for long periods, separating people who didn't get on, giving cash-handling responsibility to those who could count, putting the less capable in positions where they could be supervised by others, and so on.

The bulk of the rota was completed by the time of our pre-season meeting, when some more vacancies were filled. The briefing included a reinforcement of my wish that we should cease to be a forbidding property, where the stewards were supposed to glower at everyone, suspecting allcomers of malicious intent. This was against orders from above, but neither I nor my team of helpers could bear the thought of giving up our time with the express goal of making everyone miserable, including ourselves. I gave a guarded instruction to be willing to give information, but not too willing. In other words not to force information on guests, but to respond favourably to requests. In reality there were infinite numbers of ways to interpret this direction, and not everybody entirely followed the spirit of my intention, but it was still better than assuming everyone was a thief.

An important part of the briefing was the tour of the garden, showing all the volunteers what we had been up to over the winter. Those who knew the garden gained a lot from that, but I was surprised by how many of them had never been encouraged to look round before, and for whom the improvements meant little, however significant they were.

Part of the way the property had run, as we had no tea-making facilities for volunteers, was that they each slipped out for quarter of an hour in the afternoon, according to a system whereby they were relieved by another spare helper, hence seven stewards for six rooms. They would take tea in the public tea-room and were allowed a piece of home-made cake to boot. This was a ritual I was very keen to perpetuate, as I felt it helped with the integration of the disparate departments. I also included the garden staff and the admissions team from our entrance kiosk. This allowed us to sit together and build up a property-wide feeling of togetherness. We were all in the same boat. It was also very good for the visitors, as they were able to join us if they wished, and talk to us on a more informal footing, which had great benefits in building up support for what we were doing.

I suppose I was a bit of a maverick, and I remember having long arguments in years to come, when this policy no longer fitted in with target-driven management (i.e. once we had made the place lively enough to excite interest from those who would have written us off a few years earlier).Tea-rooms were run by a separate profit-making enterprise which covenanted its profits back to the property at the end of the season. So according to my understanding, the end result was an enhancement to the bottom line of the property, and this was all that mattered. This was not how the commercial side operated. They wanted me to start paying the going rate for the tea and cakes. This would involve me taking money from a budget I didn't have, paying it to them at three times cost price, so that the 200% profit made could come back to me later. I baulked at this. I could not see the sense of the profit-motivated arm charging a charity with severely limited resources, and making a profit out of it at the expense of non-existent funds, if the money was going nowhere in the end anyway.

I did a quick calculation. If we included seven Room Stewards a day, one Garden Steward, Three Gardeners and two Admissions Staff, at an estimated rate of £2.50 per head, that would amount to a total of no more than £1700, over the period we were open. Bearing in mind that the actual cost of a drink was little more than some hot water and a tea-bag or some coffee grounds, and the cakes were costing at the time no more than 50p each to buy in, the actual costs were considerably less. More like £400, in fact, but that's the nature of things. By separating the profitable from the charitable, as required by law, you make departments with incompatible thinking streams. Profit is maximised by achieving targets, and to reach those, you must make profit on every element, even from the one you were set up to support. My logic never won the argument, but my stubbornness forced a compromise. At first we got our teas for free, until they caught on to that. Then I paid 50p per head. Finally it went up to £1. None of the money people was ever able to comprehend the non-financial benefits of team-building and interaction with the public that the system brought. And of course, our unfortunate Tea-room Managers were under pressure from their own superiors as a result. It is a poor world that only strives to be rich in gold.

I'm not going to go on for ages about volunteers, except to say that generally I really enjoyed working with them. I made many good friends, and I learned a lot about people-management through trying out my errors on them.

I was allowed to select a prescribed number of staff and volunteers to attend Buckingham Palace for our Centenary in 2005. The group I chose came from all areas of involvement. I drove them up to London in a hired minibus on a scorching hot day, and everyone had a marvellous time. As a thank-you gift they clubbed together and gave me some cash, with which I bought an electric typewriter. I got it to write my novel on, but didn't have time to get started. I did write a short story on it eventually. Interestingly, at this time, I don't think we had a computer at work. We had only recently got a word-processor. Prior to that, I hadn't even had an office. All my paperwork, coach-bookings and the like had been done at home and hand-written. I used to carry my entire filing system to and from work in an old orange box. Why I bothered to take it to work, I do not know, as there was no chair to begin with, and certainly no desk. Still more of my administrative filing was kept in my head, which was at that time still capable of such feats of memory.

On the road to Royal approval. I've told you about some of these people already. And I was too busy to shave.

Day 38 - Counting gryphons

Back to year one. There were two parts to my job. One was to do with gardening, but I had been given a poisoned chalice, in that I was also responsible for making the place work as a visitor attraction, when, frankly, it had no history to suggest that it would work. In fact, it was the anticipation of failure that had led to the decision only to accept the legacy on cautious terms, which included the possibility of disposing of it later if it didn't work out. Essentially, my appointment was a last-ditch attempt to make a go of it, with an underlying assumption that the idea was probably going nowhere.

On the other hand, poor though the visitor response had been, the previous year had shown the highest numbers so far, albeit peaking at only around eighteen and a half thousand. This was partly because of the very restricted opening hours for the house, based on the terms of private occupancy, and partly because the garden was a disappointment, particularly as viewed by members of the organisation who were accustomed to seeing better. There was no shortage of complaints.

So although I have shown myself to have been busy in my first months setting in motion a number of urgent horticultural improvements to address these issues, I also had a commitment to organising the opening arrangements to make the property more efficient and more attractive to visitors. In this I had absolutely no experience at all. Not a clue. The longed-for failure had arrived in gardener's overalls and safety boots, and was about to prove the pessimistic contingent at Head Office right.

Except I got lucky by applying common sense to the challenge. I decided that what visitors needed was a welcome, the provision of information, and friendly, communicative service. Those were the basics as I saw them. Some of the ways of achieving them I learned by observing our helpers at work after the season started. Some I set about implementing immediately.

But before that even, I met another of our behind-the-scenes volunteers, who got involved once a year in the closed season. She stood at the front door one day, looking out at the garden and apparently remarked, 'who is that handsome man?' Turns out she was referring to me. Probably her distance vision wasn't too good, but that wasn't the facility she required for what she did for us. She had been responsible for compiling the inventory of all the contents of the house so we knew what we had. Her close-up vision was faultless, and she had indelibly numbered everything in unobtrusive places. She was here to help me check the inventory, to ensure that everything was still there and in good condition, a necessary annual check when your house is being lived in by outsiders. I don't have a background in furniture, paintings, porcelain, metalwork, stoneware, objects de vertu in general. I'm not stupid either, but I needed help with this. I learned a huge amount from working alongside her every winter for the rest of my time there, and broadened the scope of my knowledge and sensitivity considerably. She came to visit me here at home some 25 years later, and was chauffered by her bridge partner, who, it transpired, was the very same man who had been my first boss in Scotland. He too had also finally landed south of the border. A happy coincidence which allowed me to rekindle that relationship that I thought was gone forever.

Through working with this volunteer, I became aware of the huge responsibility of caring for so many irreplaceable items of high value, and of the fact that I was going to have to reach deep within myself to grow to fill my new role.

However, I also began to sense that my absence from the garden was perhaps viewed by the team as skiving, or at least a sign that by combining the two roles into one, the organisation had contrived to ensure that neither one would be done properly. Or that may just have been paranoia on my part. Whichever it was, it set within me a tendency to work twice as hard to prove them all wrong.

I was, after all, the custodian of a house containing a beautiful perfume burner and pair of gryphons by Matthew Boulton, and at the same time in charge of potentially one of the finest twentieth-century gardens in the country. I just needed to prove I was worthy.

Day 37 - Pass the wrench

'Do you wrench your roses?' I jumped. Hadn't seen him creeping up on me from where I was in the border inspecting the debilitated shrubs for black spots, rust and mildew. 'Wrench?' I gasped incredulously. 'Yes, I knew an old gardener once who swore by it. On poor soils roses need their roots stimulating, so he'd go round every autumn with a garden fork, driving it in at the base of each one, and forcing for all he was worth till all the roots snapped.' 'And that helps how?' I mused, trying to keep a straight face. 'Well, by breaking the roots, it stimulates new vigorous ones to regrow, and makes the plant stronger.' 'Oh, I'll have to try that,' I said, with no intention whatsoever of doing so. What was he thinking? I know root pruning is an essential part of bonsai training, and it does stimulate new fibrous root growth, but it is accompanied by unfeasible amounts of coddling, feeding and watering to compensate for the insult that has been perpetrated on the plant's vascular system. Just smashing up a shrub rose's life support mechanism and walking away is not going to cut it. It's going to kill it. Or seriously set it back, at any rate. The answer, if you want to stimulate your tired old plants, is to give them plenty of compost, food and water. Roses like lots of all three. And it was the absence of these in our thin chalk soil that was laying them low. That and the fatigue of old age.

But there we have it. Old-fashioned garden wisdoms are not to be relied on. In gardening there are not just three wise men out there. There are hundreds of thousands. Everybody has a glib phrase or some smart-arse knowledge backed by oral tradition. They know things that their father told them their grandfather said about how great-grandad used to swear by this trick his father would use. Or there are the types who have read all the books, and stand in their gardens, or worse still, kneel, in their pristine, unsullied gardening gloves, and theorise at their plants, hoping they'll just give in. It certainly makes me feel like giving up. Pay them no mind, any of them. It's all just mythology, handed down from half-man, half-beasts in horned helmets who were just guessing, or written up by academics who have never had soil under their fingernails. (I know - I am being unfair to the genuine guys here,but as a general pointer, question everything you hear, because most of it is inflated bluster. Then question it again).

For example, I'm sick of people who tell me they 'like to keep the hoe moving', that it acts like a mulch and is as good as a drenching to your drought-stricken herbage. Bollocks. If your plants need a drenching, give them one. Running around with a hoe will only expose damper soil to the air, ensuring more evaporation, not less. Besides, the way most people use a hoe is next to useless. I will have plenty more to say about that later, and about kneeling.

Anyway, we struggled on for ten years with our exhausted old roses, until a lucky break came my way. With a change of staff, not only did we lose all the infectious long-standing disgruntlement that had been passed down over the years as a reaction to my iconoclastic behaviour, but we also gained a rose man on the team. In his first days with us, he astounded me by identifying the roses we had propagated, just by looking at leafless stems in the ground, and I knew I had found the person who could sort out this mess for us. He would also prune the roses according to their classification, I was sure, rather than using my blanket with which I covered all eventualities, with reasonable success, I must admit.

This worked well for the best part of five years, by which time we had secured the funding and the approval to replace the main shrub rose border. I turned the design of this over to him, and he drew up a marvellous plan which I still have a copy of. It was then just a question of digging everything out, double-digging and incorporating copious quantities of organic matter (in quantities far greater than most of you are probably imagining) and planting new roses dipped in mycorrhizal fungi to encourage establishment in soil which had already had half a century of roses stripping it of all its goodies.

He's a marvellous man. You've seen him before. He's Head Gardener now.

There were also tall steel frames to be sited to carry climbers to impart height to the area. Sadly, I left before this planting came to maturity, and I have no photographic evidence beyond the early planted stage below.

I am hoping the boys will send me some photographs of how it looks this year, twelve years on from that. Please? I will put them up here, even if the blog has gone on somewhere completely different by then. Or perhaps you have got some of recent years, showing it at its best? I'd love to see some, and post them on tomorrow's blog!

As for the man in the yellow wellies, he's been there longer than I was. Given that I believe firmly that the experience we have of a garden comes from the influence of its current team, it's clear who now holds the bragging rights!

Day 36 - The thorn in my side

I've almost completed the story of my first winter in the job that established my career. I was blundering about with an unearned confidence, secure in the knowledge that even if I was making a terrible mistake, nobody would really know. If I pursued my duties with enough elan, it would be assumed that I had sufficient experience to justify such bravado, and, as long as it all worked out right, the end would justify the means. I was probably a trifle optimistic, because tacit disapproval could be read in the countenances of my colleagues on occasion. On most occasions, if truth were told, although eventually sheer brass neck won the day, when everything turned out well. I still don't know how I managed that. The picture above is five years on from the tale I am about to tell.

The only other major horticultural task I tackled that first winter was the pruning of the shrub roses. What a pig of a job. We had huge borders of these, one of about 150 sq.m., consisting of nothing but old-fashioned shrub roses, another of at least twice that, where the plantings were mixed shrubs and herbaceous, but where roses were the main feature. In addition, the rest of the garden also had a considerable number of old roses dotted through the shrub beds. Buy yourself a pruning manual. I dare you. Take it at face value. Here you will learn the incontrovertible rules for rose pruning. It's quite simple, really. As long as you know what group your rose falls into. There are established systems for Species Roses, other ones for Old Garden Roses. These latter can be divided into sub-groups. As long as you know if your plant is an Alba, a Damask, a Moss or a Provence, then you will be able to read up on how to treat it. Alternatively, it might be a Bourbon, a China or a Portland, in which case you will have to learn another method. Should it be a Gallica, then that is different again. Then you might find a Hybrid Musk tucked in amongst the others. That has its own set of instructions. Rugosas too. God help you if you also have Modern Shrub types. Or Creeping Ramblers. Naturally, these are different from ordinary Ramblers, which in turn are not the same as Climbers (these two classes differ from one another in an important way which does affect the way they need to be pruned, so I advise you pay attention here). As for modern border Roses, there are the Large-Flowered Bush Roses (or Hybrid Teas), which are not the same as the Cluster-Flowered Bush Roses (Floribundas). And of course, nowadays you get the category of English Roses. Add in to all this the various refinements for training Roses up pillars, over arches, on rope swags, or pegged down to the ground in Victorian style, and you have a recipe for confusion that will have you reeling.

As for me, I don't even particularly like roses, and even though I had had a substantial number of old-fashioned types in my previous job, I hadn't had to immerse myself in their culture, as I had left before they needed much work. No, Old Roses are a pain in the neck in more ways than one. They tend to be more disease-prone than modern varieties which have been bred for health and vigour. To stop them turning grey from mildew, or defoliating themselves from blackspot, we had to resort to fungicidal sprays. That was fundamentally against my environmental aims, but seemingly unavoidable at the time. On the other hand, we never used insecticides, preferring to encourage the natural predators. As a consequence we had a garden full of wasps, and ladybirds used to overwinter in my beard. The place would be buzzing with hoverflies as a result of our no insecticide policy. The sight of a hoverfly gives me shivers of pleasure still. If I hadn't been a gardener, I think I would have liked to study entomology. I love shield bugs, and curiosities such as the Humming-bird Hawk Moth which used to visit us. The dragonflies and damsel-flies flitting across the pond too, were a delight. A garden is about so much more than flowers. I digress. The point is that old-fashioned roses are not particularly environmentally friendly if you want to grow them well, and the mythology surrounding the pruning regime is so convoluted as to make even the most intrepid want to give up. I think garden writers want to create a sense of mystery that only the initiated can penetrate, to keep their professional aloofness, and make them indispensable, so that the money keeps coming in. I hope that what I am writing serves to demythologise the whole shebang, and shows us professionals up to be pompous poseurs with a superiority or narcissistic personality complex that could lead to a Presidency one day.

In the end, I took a long look at the task before me, saw that none of the roses seemed to be thriving, deduced that no particular pattern had been applied in the previous fifty years, and set my own blanket rule for getting us out of the mire. I applied the technique of renewal pruning to everything. I would take out the oldest stems right to ground level, leaving younger, more vigorous ones to do the flowering the following year. As usual, I would be mindful of the scale of the border as a whole, and the need to get a sense of movement through it, which I termed ebb and flow, and I selectively reduced some of the shrubs to create this. Always I left an open centre, and pruned to a bud facing in a direction which would enhance the natural shape of the bush. Mostly this would be an outward-facing one, but that was by no means a hard and fast rule. Ramblers on tripods would be treated as they should,cutting out all the strong stems that had flowered this year, and tying in the summer's fresh whippy growth to flower once the following summer. Climbers are different, and apart from removing some very old stems, the idea was to keep an established framework and prune back the sideshoots that emerged from this. On these the flowers would form the following summer. Hybrid Teas and Floribundas are common enough for most people to know what to do with them, but judging by the looks I got, my approach was considerably more severe than anything that had been seen in the garden for a very long time, and possibly ever.

Some early photographs like the above show that there was still a long way to go. There was always the possibility, of course, that these plants were beyond redemption, having been in situ for up to 50 years. That was a decision we came to much further down the line, the year I left, in fact. There will be examples of that to show tomorrow. Not all of it looked as sparse as this, however, and some parts of the borders were quite full, even after the depredations of my pruning.

Roses, then, a continuing story. I will tell you more in my next instalment. Unless I go somewhere else entirely.

Day 35 - Long hot summer days.

Before I leave the subject of lawns altogether and ask you to trust me, I'm a gardener, when I tell you that the work and environmental heart-rending is worth it, I will mention the business of watering. There is a powerful school of thought that argues that you shouldn't waste water on lawns. It hinges on the idea that grass is designed to survive drought, and will recover once the rain starts to fall again.

I'm not going to argue with that. It has an element of truth to it, but it is not the whole story. That strategy will work fine for situations where the state of the grass doesn't matter, which may be any garden from let's say the 1980's onwards. Perhaps 1990's. Depends when you think environmentalism began to catch on in a generalised way. However, in a 1930's garden, brown, bare grass wouldn't be countenanced. And when the whole presentation depends on that pristine, weed-free sward laying down its carpet to set off your beautiful plantings, then water comes into consideration. Because now we are entering the realm of historical accuracy.

While it may be acceptable, or even seasonally attractive for your turf to turn yellow on the 100-acre view of an 18th century landscape garden, applying a scorched-earth policy to a 1930's formal garden, laid out with fine-turf paths in some cases no more than a metre wide, is a very different proposition. Nobody suggests you should turn off the heating in your leaky historic house on environmental grounds, because that would lead to damage to contents. I'm all for the Beth Chatto approach, with her zero-water dry garden. It is the perfect solution to the desert conditions of Essex, and is the correct modern way to solve a problem of today. Grow the plants to suit the conditions, rather than change the conditions to suit the plants. However, if your task is preserving something different, something with historic importance with a different past, then other rules must apply.

Quite simply, a grass path will not stand up to wear unless it is growing vigorously. It needs water for that. And a lawn which dries out, does not recover completely. The regrowth will be patchy. Coarse grasses, mosses and weeds will creep in the following year. And your grass is meant to look perfect, so to regain that quality, you are then forced to reseed, eradicate weeds, top-dress, cultivate. All of these actions will have an environmental impact, not least the eradication of weeds. So you have to think in terms of balance. Is it perhaps not better to squander water in order to save on chemicals and tractor exhausts belching diesel fumes into the air? My view was that it was always less damaging to preserve what we already had, than to recover it once it was lost. and the place looked better for it through the period of stress, and maintained the interest of visitors. This in turn brought us the income needed to continue the improvements. There is no point stepping forward, only to have to step the same distance back.

Watering is not a recovery procedure, though. If you wait till the ground has dried out completely before you start, then the water runs off and deposits itself somewhere lower down where you don't need it. That's where water goes of its own accord when it's not wanted. So, it is a matter of being on the lookout for what the weather will do, not reacting to what it has already done. You must start your watering before the garden is lolling its tongue on the ground, gasping. You must do it while there is enough moisture in the soil to facilitate the uptake of more, and preferably you should do it at night, when it is cool and less evaporation will take place. We couldn't afford pop-up sprinklers on a timer everywhere, although eventually we had a system installed which watered the main terrace at night. The rest we still had to do with hoses and percussion sprinklers dragged out every day and set up where needed. Once set up, we then had to leave them to do their job for enough hours to thoroughly soak in before moving them on. It used to take weeks to get round the whole garden, which is another reason why it was important to start early, otherwise we would already have lost some areas before even reaching them with the hoses. We also had underground irrigation in another area of the garden, which I will describe in due course. This cuts out the evaporation factor altogether, putting the water directly at the roots, but we didn't use it on turf.

So far so good. I was trying my best to minimise the environmental impact of running an old-fashioned garden. I am a good guy, but I was also conscious of the compromises I was making. I was always on the look-out for any new developments in horticultural science which would help. So was the organisation I worked for. Sometimes they were ahead of me on the path to righteousness, and sometimes I was ahead of the game. Let it be known here, that I took the garden into the peat-free arena in my first year there. I think ours may have been the first garden in the organisation to go down this route. I don't know. We never found out, because we did it quietly, without a fuss, in 1991. Of course, being pioneers, we found that our path wasn't easy. It was still impossible to buy the plants we needed from suppliers who were prepared to use peat-free composts. In fact, at the time, the trade was very reluctant to risk profitability by experimenting. It was much later that the organisation was able to find enough peat-free suppliers, or to provide plants from its own nursery, so that we could all be sure that even our imported plants were not stripping wetland habitats.

We began to make our own composts, starting with coir. Ours came ground to dust, like Turkish coffee, stained your hands permanently and watering it was an unpredictable general disaster. So we started mixing our own from bark, leaf-mould and soil that we sterilised ourselves in a hot box that would hold a couple of sackfuls. It was variable in quality, but it worked. And we never again reverted to the old ways. Told you. I'm a good guy. And I remain one, despite Donald Trump across the Atlantic, and despite uncountable, unspeakable unfairnesses practised in the political sphere here on our own poor island. I still have faith that we have the ability to find a solution to all these affronts. We will come down in favour of renewable energy. We will make chemicals unnecessary in the culture of plants, even on a field scale. We will find innovative solutions to the global water crisis. You can be a good guy too. But you can't have it all at once. It's a process. We learn from the history I had the privilege of preserving. And if we learn enough, and apply science to it, then we grow beyond it, and can keep it going without future damage. Yet still it will be there for all to see, in perpetuity, properly managed. Let's all be good guys, build the future while preserving and learning from the past. End of sermon. Amen.

But it makes a dynamic picture, doesn't it? I feel that hot morning in the pores of my flesh even now, looking at it. A wistful nostalgia creeps across me for those long, hot summer days when I was earning a living making something truly beautiful. If that wasn't a good life, then I wouldn't know where to look to find one.

Day 34 - Terrifying and moaning

Well, we kept at it for fifteen years, feeding and mowing, scarifying and slitting, and all that, and even on my last day I wasn't satisfied. The lawns had had so many years of poor maintenance that they would take a lifetime to rescue. This was compounded by steadily increasing visitor numbers putting the turf under more stress every year.

Visitors would approach me with a wide grin and say, 'your lawns are marvellous. Like a bowling green', and then they would go and ruin it by adding, 'so lovely and springy underfoot.' I would have liked a grin-wiper for every time someone said that to me. Springy in a lawn means thatch and moss. It means you haven't achieved the optimum. It might feel sensual for the barefoot hippie, but it doesn't mean you have a good lawn in the best of health and beautifully maintained.

I found out in the autumn of my first year that one of the problems was that clearly no one who worked here had known the fine points of good turf maintenance. For fifty years the grass had been mown in one direction only, longitudinally, to minimise the amount of turns and to accentuate the linearity of the layout. Every stripe had been repeatedly pushed in the same direction up to forty times a year for the last half-century. We had our blades set to cut to a height of half an inch, but when we came to scarify, we discovered that much of the grass was nine inches long, and pressed flat, with only the last half-inch turned up to face the mower. Good job the scarifying was done after the end of the open season, because the place looked a mess afterwards, with coarse, stringy stems cut off in their prime and much of the green removed. But it had to be done.

When it comes to terrifying your lawn, as I preferred to call it after this experience, it does not pay to be timid. You should not set your blades to go deeper than soil level, but they should just touch the surface to ensure that they pull out the maximum of thatch. Do not be frightened of the amount of spoil it brings up. We used to scarify in four directions, our problem was so bad, and each pass brought out a huge amount of waste material. Here is the tennis court getting its second raking of the day -

Obviously, I had to initiate some changes to the regime to stop the problems being compounded in the future. There was little point in dethatching, only to continue to push the lawn in the same direction as always. In a major change to the status quo, I insisted that in future we would be mowing in four different directions in consecutive weeks, which we termed long-ways, short-ways, and two diagonals. Needless to say, this was yet another unpopular iconoclasm that no doubt stimulated much complaint behind the scenes, but its validity proved itself the first time we tried to go against the grain. As we mowed across the path of the stripes, the mower would be dragged first to the left and then to the right, wavering uncontrollably with every stripe it crossed. It took years to tear and mow out this bias and achieve proper straight lines in all directions. And the grass continued to prostrate itself in the direction it had always been mown in, until we finally forced it to surrender.

Eventually we were able to achieve lawns that looked like this -

And this -

And this -

And this -

And this -

Now I know there is a tendency in modern gardens to ignore the impact of a good lawn. I know there is a school of thought that says, 'as long as it's green, it's fine', but when you see a good expanse of turf and how it sets off the rest of the planting, and compare it with the 'it's ok, it's green' type, there is absolutely no contest in my book. Not only that, but I personally don't know how to be satisfied with less than perfection. Even if I know that I can't ever achieve it, I will keep on striving. I sincerely believe the modern way with grass in gardens is the result of laziness, of the body, the mind and the eye. Gardeners often don't like doing turf work. It is hard, it is repetitive, it is boring. It takes you away from the fancy touches we all like to be involved with. But, oh, how it enhances those embellishments when you get it right.

The other thing that mitigates against intensive turf maintenance nowadays is the environmental difficulties it brings. I get that. Everybody knows that a traditionally-managed golf course is the most sterile, polluting, green leisure facility there is.  But given the choice of giving up on high standards, and working to find methods of achieving them in a non-destructive way, I'll opt for the hard road any time.

I cut this out of the paper years ago. Don't know who to credit for it, but didn't feel I could leave it out.

Day 33 - Got any grass, man? 2

I expect you may be thinking that this is all becoming rather disjointed, that having started off so well with a linear tale of my first couple or three gardening jobs, I have gone off piste and am jumbling everything up. Well, I had better haul you back with a surprise revelation - this all has form. What I am finding difficult is tying in the photographs with the narrative. The problem is that I can't remember the exact chronology of everything I did 26 years ago, so I have opted for telling the whole story of each section of the work, one after another. In other words, I am not telling everything I did in 1991, followed by 1992 and so on, but I am choosing a task undertaken right at the beginning, such as Spring Bedding, and following the progress of that one area through till the day I left the job. This is all very well, and makes sense in an organisational sense as far as subject matter is concerned, but it plays havoc with the pictorial evidence, which I have stored chronologically and not by subject. hence my inability to find the photograph I needed yesterday. Please forgive me these inconsistencies. I will have time to iron them out if I ever make this into a book.

So, what have we covered so far? Spring Bedding certainly. Iceberg Roses also, although I have kept back part of that story for later. The beds on the south side which had lain fallow for the previous couple of years, and which we planted with an ultimately unsuccessful scheme based on silver foliage, and eventually replaced with a collection of tender Salvias. We have discussed how pastel colour schemes work, and I have gone in some detail into the art of pruning, even into the large-scale heavy pruning of background evergreen trees. All of these projects have been followed to their conclusion, so you can see how the long-term planning works out. I think only one further area we tackled in that first winter remains to be described.

Turf maintenance. There is no way we could tackle the work that this required in the first autumn, because we didn't have the equipment. We had no mini-tractor that we could use on the lawns, we had no slitter or spiker, no scarifier and no satisfactory means of distributing fertiliser, especially not of the type I intended to use. So the first months were spent, not working on the lawns, but badgering my boss for the money to buy the equipment. Obviously, there was no funding available for this, my appointment having been set up out of a desperate reactive need, with limited forward planning. I eventually got the money, around £12,000, and the first arrival was a bright orange mini-tractor, fitted with a trailer, turf tyres, a front-loader and a dual-acting spool valve for the proposed slitter, which not only had to lower to the ground, but had to continually press down on it while in use. The tractor was chosen in competition with others for being the smallest with sufficient power for the job, with by far the tightest turning-circle of any. This was essential if it was going to be used on our narrow grass paths. It also had to have hydrostatic transmission, i.e. no clumsy clutch and gearbox, but smooth transitions from forward to reverse with a simple touch of the foot. All this revolutionised our capabilities around the garden, from grass maintenance to shifting vast amounts of woody prunings and transporting lorry-loads of mulch.

The garden was laid out on approximately three and a half acres of fine turf lawns and similar footpaths, and it was my intention to treat them to a modified tennis-court standard of maintenance. This was absolutely appropriate for a garden of the 1930's to 1950's period, but involved us in a huge amount of work each year. All the mowing was done with fine-turf cylinder mowers, theoretically with a smart striped finish. Apparently meetings had been held where it had been discussed whether or not we should change the maintenance regime completely and do all the mowing with a tractor-mounted rotary mower. Well, that wouldn't have been historically appropriate, would it? I wasn't going to stand for that.

The first thing I did after getting the tractor was to spend a few hundred pounds on spray equipment with which to fertilise the lawns. If you hear the word 'spray' and wince, thinking only of chemicals, then think again. Of course, the lawns of a period garden like this did have to be weed-free. The whole reason why this kind of garden became possible in the first place was because of advances in technology and chemical science which allowed standards which could only be dreamed of in earlier times. So, yes, I did use chemicals on the lawns. As an organisation, and for myself as a gardener, we were always searching for ways to retain the same standards with less use of chemicals, or the use of less noxious ones, but we had to balance history against that. The main reason why I needed a sprayer, though, was in order to introduce a more environmentally-friendly way of fertilising, one which I had started using in my previous job. I wanted to use liquid seaweed, which is full of trace elements which promote strong, healthy growth without stimulating an excess of foliar extension. It is the way of things that someone, somewhere will discover that extracting seaweed from the sea is also environmentally damaging, and an alternative will have to be found. That is an eternal cycle - you try your best, and it is never good enough. The only way to cure it is to banish the human race altogether, and with it the excessive demands it makes on the planet it calls home. But please, in my obituary in The Times, will you put, 'A man who tried'? Anyway, the effect on the lawns was very satisfactory, and they had their first spray just before we opened for that first season.


Remember the dried-out, worn-out grass I had inherited?

It wasn't that long before it was restored to this -

Same area, after one, or possibly two applications of seaweed fertiliser in August of the same year. The pathetic fountain in the pond, by the way, was mains fed, and illegal, not being a recycling system. We capped it off in subsequent restoration work on the pond, which I hope to show later. Note how the lilies are trying to climb out of the water, a sure sign of overcrowding and insufficient depth of water.

Day 32 - The plantsman's knickers

Yesterday I got quite heavily into the discipline of pruning. I don't want to bore those who come here because they are nosy about someone else's life, or who like to read a bit of humour now and then. To those people I can only say that your time will come again, but you must share this page with others who have a specifically horticultural interest.

Now, I mentioned before that, having been offered this job, I had been severely intimidated by the idea of managing a so-called plantsman's garden. As a young relative beginner, that sounded a bit high-flying for my level of experience. However, as I began to familiarise myself with the plants, it dawned on me that it was not as complex as I had assumed. For a start, whether I was familiar with them or not, they were all just plants, and if I ballsed up, I could always dig them out and start again. That was the first attitude change that was necessary. I had not been commanded by god to preserve every single element in perpetuity. My job was to restore and bring the place up to fighting weight, so it could compete alongside the great gardens. Along the way there were bound to be sacrifices.

Also, in the process of learning my job, I was able to witness other gardens doing their own particular thing. I visited plantsman's gardens, and was struck by how much import was attached to the provenance of some of the plants, or their rarity value. It mattered whether it had been plucked by a man hanging from a rope off  the north face of a mountain in an inaccessible province of China in 1876. Or that it was the first plant grown from a particular George Forrest seed-collecting trip. Or it might have been a rare Rhododendron from a remote Himalayan valley. I saw these plants being worshipped like icons or religious relics. Everything was done to keep them alive, even when long past their best. Many, of course were very fine indeed, and worthy of the attention they were receiving. Others, frankly, were not.

The reason some plants are rare in cultivation is that in all honesty, they are not good 'doers'. A plant becomes common or garden by being taken up by the many. The reasons for this are usually that it is showy, has a long flowering season, it is healthy, vigorous and hardy. All of the above, or a selection in combination. The reason a plant is rare is often that its appeal stretches to historians and anoraks and not far beyond. Sometimes they make no visual contribution to a garden at all, disappearing into the background, advertising their rarity by their invisibility. Sometimes they are rare simply because they are just so damn difficult to grow that most people give up. If you want to look at a cabinet of curiosities, go to a plantsman's garden. Here each plant will be given individual attention, and will have a personal story attached. You can befriend a tree, learn its history, its genealogy. It will become a family tree. But if you want to go to a garden which will enfold you, calm your troubled mood, smile at you, and captivate you with its art, then avoid the plantsman's garden like the plague. Few of them are maintained subtly enough to make you laugh or cry. Unless you are a collector of horticultural possessions or a scientist. They are the gardens in which each plant is an individual, treated with awe and respect, and they appeal to the intellect. The places that hug you are altogether different.

So I gradually discovered that our garden was a plantsman's paradise only in so far as there were a number of more unusual specimens in amongst the bulk of the planting which consisted of relatively common items. They needed to be, because on the poor thin layer of stodgy clay on top of chalk, and the utter exposure to the south-westerly prevailing wind and frequent frosts, little else would have a chance unless provided the shelter of other specimens which were so robust as to be near-immortal.

From this grew my personal approach to pruning. No matter what I was working on, if I saw something that required intervention, I would first stand back and look at its surroundings from a distance. I would see how the specimen fitted into the wider picture around it, and I would plan my manipulations in consideration of that. As soon as you start to reduce a shrub, the relationship of its scale to the bulk of its companions will change. Do you tread carefully and employ only minimal intervention, or do you recognise that, having done what was necessary for the first plant, you will also have to modify its neighbours too? This is where gardening becomes art. The gardener has to have the eye, the intuitive ability to read shape, form, colour, texture and mass, and to understand how to manipulate it to create ebb and flow, and harmony. Far too many people are unable to step beyond colour when looking at their environment, but it is about so much more. It is a painterly art, and a sculptural one, it appeals to all the senses, has growth and change over time in it, like music, and above all, in gardens open to the public, it is a performing art. You are doing your work in front of an audience, and it needs to be done with panache, with a flourish. the way you wield your tools is the display tail of a Bird of Paradise. My wife loves to watch me hoeing the borders, because she says I bear my equipment with the grace of all masters who are at one with their tools. The same applies to hedgecutting. To prune the mushrooms (topiary based on staddle-stones) we had to be able to scribe perfect circles in the air with a five-and-a-half kilo hedgecutter from the top of a set of steps, and move around them with the sure-footedness of mountain goats. People queued up to take photographs of that.

That love of performance was what gave me the greatest pleasure in my work, and led me to adopt a working pattern for all the staff which put us out there meeting the public. But that's a long way down the line. To begin with, we still had three tea-breaks a day, worked Monday to Friday, and the topiary remained the province of the senior member of my team for the next five years when I took it over. I had been longing to get my hands on it for all that time. Not that it was being done badly. It was in fact being done with great care. I would just do it differently, and there were some quite small discrepancies I wanted to iron out.

This next photograph should be me having the most fun I could ever have in a garden. I say that, but we did find a pair of knickers in one of the borders once, so obviously there are alternative ways of taking one's pleasure in an outdoor environment. Anyway, the picture is supposed to be of me, imperious, astride my double-sided stepladder wafting my hedgecutter gregariously before an admiring crowd. Unfortunately, I can't find it anywhere on my system. It was taken by an appreciative visitor and sent to me later, and I have lost it. I know I have it. I just can't show it to you, so you'll just have to take my word for the balletic grace with which I shift across my ladder, carving perfect geometry into our bushes. As a palliative, I offer you an alternative photo, and an interactive interlude. Captions please, entered in the comments box below!

I'm the one with half a beard.

Day 31 - Serious thing. Whole-border philosophy.

This post is not about tulips.

What did we learn yesterday? Gardens, whilst being ephemeral and ever-changing, are also potentially long-lasting. With trees, you should never plant without considering the consequences. Our yew trees had failed because they had been stuck in the ground fifty years ago, and nobody had considered how they were to be maintained. That will always lead to disaster. How many of us in our more modest houses have neighbours with a weeping willow in their garden which crowds everything else out and sucks all the moisture from the soil, causing subsidence? Or a shallow-rooting eucalyptus which blows over in a high wind taking the roof with it. How many suburban gardens are plagued by the so-called clump-forming bamboo Phyllostachys nigra, which romps across the land, respecting no fence or boundary?

It's the same with shrubs. It is all too easy to be seduced by the label or catalogue description, which gives a height and spread for each bush that actually represents an estimate of its dimensions after five years. Buy on this basis at your peril. Surely the Old Man had no idea when he planted his 6' x 6' smoke bushes close to all his grass paths that after forty years they would reach 15' x15' and that his gardeners would have no clue what to do with them when they did. Other than to hedge them up to the very edge of the grass and leave them to achieve whatever height they liked, thus turning every border into a wall. Come on, that's not a garden. I don't have any perfect illustrations of this, but there are one or two pre-restoration shrub border photos which show what  mess can look like. They don't make a blog look attractive, though, hence the inclusion of yet another tulip picture at the beginning.

So, here we come to the next in our series of tips.

Firstly, always leave more space than you think will be necessary. Do you want to have to mutilate your plants later to keep them where you thought they would stay, or have you the patience to wait till they fill their allotted space naturally? (The second option is the correct one).

Secondly, what do you do if they still insist on growing beyond your tolerance? That's called pruning, and it differs immensely from what most people do with their wayward shrubs. There are a number of points to be considered here. One of those is when to do the work. Well, there are so many rules about pruning that people have written whole volumes on the subject, mostly with the effect of maintaining a level of secrecy and mythology about the subject which is entirely unnecessary. You are not going to do irreparable harm to most subjects by giving it a go. If the plant you are dealing with is one of those where you will damage it by pruning, that is, if it is one of those tricky customers that does not regrow after cutting back, then one of two things has happened. You may have been too vigorous in your excitement, and cut back too hard into old wood, which some plants don't like, or you may have chosen the wrong plant for that position in the first place. In this case, it will always have been destined to grow beyond its bounds, and you should have thought of that before planting it there, and trying to rescue it by unsuitable pruning. The answer is quite simple. Admit your mistake and pull it up. Replace it with something else, or replant the same thing, but in the right place, further back for example. Don't get sentimental about your plants. They are the materials you create your art with. They are not sacrosanct. Treat them like paint on a canvas. You can rub them out and get it right next time.

What about the shrubs that do respond to pruning? Well, that's easy, isn't it? Anybody can do that? That's what you would think when looking at the confident swipes people take at their gardens with various chopping, slashing and cutting implements. But look closely at what they are doing. For the most part your average domestic gardener or hard-pressed contractor will make a choice from a limited range of options. He (or she) will either take the hedgecutters to the object of their irritation, and make a garden of unsightly blobs of various degrees of uniformity, or he (I'm not going to constantly repeat the content of my parentheses) will, believing him ( ) self superior to such affronts, produce the secateurs and proceed to apply carefully considered cuts to his ( ) shrubs. Only rarely will what he (not going to bother with the brackets any more) does accord with what I would do. Far too often you will see him try to create a shape which does not obscure the lawn or interfere with the plant next to it, and by using secateurs will consider he has improved on the hedgecutter technique. But oh so often, he has only achieved the same effect, but much slower. Why on earth do people always assume that pruning involves selectively cutting the ends off branches?

Pruning should be about making the shrub look like a natural specimen of its type, but smaller than before. Cutting the end off anything will stimulate growth from the buds immediately below the cut, and produce a bird's nest of regrowth that immediately takes on the impenetrable form of a hedged plant. In some cases, this may be what you want. On the other hand, the only way to provide a natural look to the object of your attention, is to select the growth that needs to be removed, and go all the way with it. Trace it right back to where it originates, and cut it off there. It may start as a side-shoot from another branch, in which case that is where you remove it, at its point of origin. Or it may have grown out of the soil, in which case take it back to ground level. What is left will carry the natural shape of the species and will always look more beautiful and harmonious in your border.

Think of a Philadelphus, the mock orange, with its scented blossom in summer. What do the pruning manuals tell you to do with that? Wait till after they have flowered, then cut off the flowered shoots, leaving the new growth to flower next year. The problem is that all pruning rules stem from the needs of fruit growers, and are designed to produce the maximum amount of flowers, to result in the greatest yield of fruit. In the ornamental garden that is not necessarily what we need. What we need here is a plant which works as part of a greater whole, in conjunction with its neighbours. It is no longer about treating it as an individual and stimulating the highest number of flowers. We have to ask, 'does it sit well with its neighbours'? It will only do that if it looks natural. Obviously, I am excluding structural topiary from this. I am approaching this from the point of view of a garden that is laid out on a formal structure with informal planting billowing out from within that. If you prune your Philadelphus as the rule book states, you will cut off all the arching tips that bow towards the ground, leaving the beginnings of that arching curvature cut off in their prime, and topped by very strong vertical growth which couldn't look more unnatural. I used to go totally against the recommendations of the experts on this. I would remove many of the parts I was supposed to leave, and leave the bits that should have ended up in the shredder. The result was a more natural looking plant which still carried plenty of flowers the next year, but which looked more normal and more comfortable in the border for a much longer time. And don't forget when you have finished to look at the border as a whole. Your pruning work will have changed the height and spread of your plant, and its relation with the plants around it will have changed. In the interest of border harmony, they may now also need work, regardless of what the pedants will say about appropriate timing or methods. Take an instinctive, whole-border approach to your labours and you will end up with a much better garden. And people will not understand what it is about your methods that make your work look better than theirs. They will just know that they have seen something different, something considered, something artistic. Not a vision of rule-book savagery with an eye only on the science and ignoring the beauty.

The other mistake far too many people make, regardless of which of the above less than desirable techniques they employ, is that they fail to make the right decision about how far to cut back. If the plant is hanging over the lawn, making it difficult to mow, almost invariably they cut it back to the edge of the lawn. What's wrong with that, you may ask? Well, it's quite elementary, Watson. The immediate response of a pruned plant is to replenish itself with even more vigour, so no sooner have you turned your back, than the plant is infringing again, and you begin to get impatient, believing this to be a never-ending curse that plagues you for the whole year. It's the sort of thing that makes people who don't know enough about it hate gardening. The answer is simple. You must cut back much further than the space you have mentally allotted to your plant. You must shape it beautifully with carefully considered cuts, and you must make a space for the plant to grow into, not hack it back to the edge of the space it is supposed to fill, leaving it no alternative but to outgrow itself immediately.

Everybody starts their pruning too late. If you want a plant to be six feet tall, prune it when it gets there, not when it is already nine feet. This allows you more choices of potential cuts to create a natural shape, because the bush is less obscured and entangled. You can see what you are doing. Pruning should never be a rescue exercise in a well-managed garden. It should only ever be used as a means to create the work of art. It is a sculptural practice, not remedial. It should make your garden look better, not worse.

It is a difficult balance, and when you inherit a garden where all the planting distances have been set wrong, it is a constant battle. The photograph below shows what some borders grew back to after pruning. They were now ready for their next reduction. Note that the obelisk used as an eye-catcher at the end of the avenue of lime trees is almost obscured, and so we had to lift the crowns of the trees as well, before the vista worked once more.

The pruning we did to arrive at that effect resulted in the borders looking like this, which clearly shows how the view through the trees should work, helped, of course, by the clarity arising from the absence of winter foliage. Note the straight edges of the lawn directing the gaze.

To arrive at the pruned stage above, it is necessary to recognise the problem early enough. We did not have this luxury. Below is what we had to contend with. I used to show these last two pictures as before and after when giving slide shows, and I was always astounded by how many gasps of approval the second picture received, from audiences who were clearly blinded to the state of collapse of some of the shrubs, and the lack of direction the wandering grass path forced upon the view. They just liked the pretty flowers. Sorry, you people. It's about so much more than that!