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.
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