In my previous job, we couldn't start till the bus from town had discharged its passengers and they had had time to stroll up the drive to check in for work. After two years that felt like normal, so on the Monday, I rolled in early at 8.15, ready for an 8.30 start, only to find one of the team in the back of a border raking up leaves, it being early October. Turns out they started work at 7.30. I've always known that gardening wasn't the ideal choice of vocation for one with my body-clock. But 7.30? That's malicious. I'm the kind of bloke who stays up till two in the morning and wakes gently by eleven. This daylight dependence that goes with gardening is not really my thing. I had to force myself into its straitjacket from the start.
There turn out to be some other peculiarities about the working conditions that no one had prepared me for, presumably because higher management hadn't been appraised of them. Such as the three tea-break plus lunch system, followed by an early dart at 3.30 to go and feed pheasants elsewhere. I had been prepared for one thing, in a vague way - I would be taking on a staff of two, one of whom had been supervising the running of the garden for the last few years. This was the guy I met in the border on my way in, nearly an hour late. Bad first impression.
We met up for tea at 9.00 am beside a grubby little sink in a corner of the machine shed, where no chairs were provided and we stood in the cold and dark, a single low-wattage bulb providing the only illuminations. Now I know what was meant by the dark ages. I tried to be my bouncy, enthusiastic self, but my heart was sinking as I looked around me. None of my lovely new machinery that I had left behind. No young team to have a laugh with. Just two older blokes approaching retirement age, who were clearly suspicious and/or apprehensive about what I might bring.
And there was I, furiously trying to work out how to proceed while making small talk over a cup of tea. They looked pretty demoralised. Both had worked for the original owner and creator of the garden for almost all of their working lives, and they had already had an unpleasant shock when the place had been left on his death to a national organisation with an unfamiliar structure and methods. Now along comes a young upstart of 37, who can't possibly have enough experience at his age to handle somewhere this large or complex, and on top of that, he was going to wrest power from the senior member of staff against his will. From my side, it looked different. I had been assigned to the garden because it was failing under the current regime, so in fact I had to look at what had gone before and make the necessary changes to raise standards. Bloody hell. When I looked at the stern countenance of him whose position I was usurping, I knew I would have to tread carefully. This was not the time to wade in with my wellies and announce that we would be doing away with the first tea-break, and starting and finishing later. That would come years in the future. In the meantime, I would have to make the limited time between breaks as productive as I could.
The other problem I had was a personal feeling of inadequacy. The job advert had stated that this was a plantsman's garden, and honestly, I knew that I didn't fit the description of 'plantsman'. I had met those in my last job. Head Gardeners of considerable repute, with their Botanic Gardens qualifications, well-travelled plant-hunters in their own right, with extensive knowledge way beyond anything I could ever hope to achieve. Two factors helped me overcome this hurdle. The first was that as the garden was a relatively recent acquisition for the organisation, a reasonably extensive plant survey had been carried out, and I was now in possession of the file that contained it. The other advantage I had was that it soon became clear that despite over forty years service each, my colleagues weren't plantsmen either, not in the sense that I had come to understand and fear the concept. In fact, not at all. It was beginning very quickly to come clear why the place had begun to deteriorate. My first task would be to take stock, learn what we had, and then think about how to treat it all. So off I went with the plant list, in the privacy of my own head, in between tea-breaks, and spent my first day, and indeed most of my first weeks, giving the grounds a good looking at and trying to memorise what was where. In the evenings, unless required for some of the heavy work of setting up our home, I would have my head in the books, studying plants I needed to become acquainted with.
Over a period, two things became evident. Firstly, very sensibly, the owner had, when designing and constructing his creation, based the whole concept on a framework of common, hardy and trustworthy plants, and although there were some more unusual specimens amongst them, the bulk of it wasn't going to be as difficult to pick up as I had envisaged. The second point was that the place was a bloody mess and desperately needed sorting out.
A couple of pictures in illustration:
Those green patches in the cracks of the paving were not patches of choice alpines such as we would replace them with in the future. They were weeds, in some places a foot high. Oh, and there was little or no colour to be seen. The whole garden was twelve acres, and this was only a small part. If it was all like this, we were going to have our work cut out. And it was going to be far worse if I encountered resistance.
This avenue of collapsing Irish Yews was a story of its own which I will tell in due course. First I had to settle my nerves and address how I was going to get my two-man team onside and get them over their current feelings of doubt and worse. I will state right here at the beginning that, certainly with one of them, I never did. I was an iconoclast, as became clear gradually through the improvements I initiated, and I was a usurper, displacing an established member of staff and bringing new ideas which ran counter to the way things had been done for the last fifty years. Nevertheless, we had a productive relationship in the end, and although it was never founded on complete trust or approval, we rubbed along okay and got a huge amount of work done. Sometimes rubbed was the only word which could describe the relationship, but I like to think there was a grudging respect in both directions by the end. Not that it didn't cause its problems at times, as we shall see later. The other gardener was a different proposition altogether, more accepting, if still very sceptical at times, with a terrific sense of humour. He still phones me up every Christmas morning, and we have a good laugh about old times and the trouble I put them through. He's 88 now.
The beginning is a good point to remember that the previous fifty-plus years of inviolable tradition were precisely what had brought the garden to this low-point, and that to recover it would require a radical rethink. I had no choice but to upset people. The art would be in how to minimise that and still make headway. And I would also have to develop new strategies for the maintenance of somewhere this size with the reduced team I had at my disposal. We would all be learning together.
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