Day 69 - Still friends?

Now, I've been through my major obsessions, or as I prefer to call them, specialisms. Over the course of my development as a gardener, a number of disciplines became what I considered to be my domain. Hedge-cutting, pruning and training climbers, turf work, colour placement, juxtaposition of shapes forms and textures, spacing of plants. The list goes on. I realise that I specialised in everything. I didn't think of myself as a plant collector, but I was even in danger of becoming one of those. I got pretty keenly involved in almost all aspects of the job. Other than propagation perhaps, which I found a bit of a necessary evil, I must admit. I didn't like being confined indoors doing the science when there were acres of art outside to get stuck into. But as we used to grow a lot of tender plants which needed to be propagated each year in preparation for the next, I had plenty of that sort of work in the early years. And I did like the orderly ranks of young plants, all labelled and laid out in rows on the benches. One of the best things I did was to recruit a team of volunteers to take on much of that behind the scenes work. I was also lucky enough to have a succession of gardeners on the team who enjoyed this kind of work too, and was glad to give them responsibility for supervising this. The results were excellent, and not only freed us up to do the work in the garden, but also gave us the opportunity to sell more of our home-produced plants from a barrow by the entrance kiosk, and also to host annual plant fairs in the later years. The sale of plants contributed several thousand pounds to the property budgets by the end of my tenure, and it was achieved by a team of volunteers and the largely spare-time, bad-weather input of the garden team. I had a strict policy of selling only plants which we had grown on site, and which could be seen within the garden. All buyers were taking away a genuine souvenir of their visit, which is not something which can be said of many properties, where plants are usually bought in.

When I arrived in post, at the beginning of the final decade of the 20th century, almost all our greenhouse facilities had been handed over in the tenancy agreement to the occupants of the house, as part of their private walled garden. All we had left, apart from 12 poorly-maintained cold-frames, was the old Orchid House, which stood alone in our open ground nursery area far from the madding crowd, near where we were growing straggly Christmas trees in a hopeless attempt to use redundant land to make money. I eventually did away with those to construct some hard standing for much-needed car-parking.

The orchid house was a good old cedar structure with low-level vents, and as I discovered after some probing, some slatted blinds to provide shade, which hadn't been used for years and were stored at the back of a pile of old junk in one of the sheds. We re-erected these and got the pulley mechanism to work so we could raise and lower them. Initially we used this house for production of bedding plants such as our Heliotropes, but we soon found that the space available was almost entirely consumed by the numbers of these that we needed to grow. It was clear that we needed to extend our facility, and as the original greenhouses were no longer available to us, we would have to find the funds to build a new one.

One of my functions as Manager-in-Charge of the property was to maintain relations with local supporters such as branches of local Members' Centres, and I had developed good relations with the nearest one fairly early on. Later we also developed good ties with two other similar groups and derived most of our voluntary support from these three, as well as annual financial aid.

One of the ways I built up contact with these groups was by offering special out-of-hours guided tours to their committees to show them what improvements we were making. At one of these I demonstrated our propagation facility and it was obvious that we were in need of help. As a result of this, I was lucky enough to receive an offer of £2500 to be used in the construction of a new greenhouse.

This I duly purchased, and to maximise the facility, I chose a self-build model to cut down on labour costs. Well, anybody who knows me will also know that I hate DIY, can't stand building work of any kind, and loathe mixing concrete. It was a good thing that our senior man was happy to lay the brick surround on which the aluminium structure would stand. The ground was slightly sloping, so he had to compensate for that, and I just let him get on with it.

When the structure arrived, we all got stuck in to assembling it. There seemed to be thousands of nuts and bolts, and an awful lot of glass, all of which came in rectangular format, which was not much use for the triangular shapes required for the gable ends. I discovered to my dismay that this meant that a lot of glass-cutting was involved. Neither of my colleagues wanted to undertake this part of the job, so it was left to me. Now, at the age of fifteen, I had had a holiday job in a builders' merchants, where one of the duties was to cut glass. I was so bad at it, breaking more than I sold, that I was eventually put onto copper pipe-cutting duties instead. It wasn't looking good for our greenhouse, especially as we didn't have anything which could properly serve as a cutting bench for the glass. However, needs must, and I quickly mastered the art, only breaking the odd piece, but we were up against it as far as time was concerned. All the rectangular glass was in, and some of the gables, but a storm was forecast and I was worried that if a gale got in to a part-glazed house the whole thing might blow apart. So after sending the chaps home to do their pheasant-feeding or whatever, I persevered into the darkness, working by the headlights of my car to get the job finished. I think I gave up with a couple of smaller triangles to finish the next day, when I was relieved to find the structure still standing. Three years in and the working area looked more like this, with the frames restored and new lights fitted. The original woodwork had been quite lightweight, whereas the new was constructed by builders and not gardeners and weighed a ton, but it all worked as long as you were prepared to put in a bit of effort. The frames were also fitted with tubular heaters to provide frost-protection, which hugely extended their usefulness, given the number of tender specimens we used.

As you can see, we had wasted little time in filling both greenhouses and all the cold frames. We had also demolished the old collapsing sunken frame and set it out as an outdoor container standing ground, just behind the aluminium house. The cold frames were in constant use by now too.

Note the appearance of an early leaf-mould pile on the left of the next pic. Can you believe that when I started on the job, they had been burning all this valuable resource for years? It formed an important component in our first peat-free composts, but the decision to keep it was not popular. I'm not sure why, as it took no more effort to pile it up than it did to set fire to it. Old habits....

By the next year we had the container area strung out for supporting young trees, and an effective small nursery was in action.

Eventually, with the help of a further two forty-foot polytunnels, we were producing enough to satisfy the needs of a 12-acre garden using a lot of tender plants propagated each year, as well as provide plants for sale at the entrance every day we were open, and in addition run a Plant Fair each year, all plants being grown in our home-made peat-free compost. The final picture shows the Head Gardener surveying his Plant Fair stock moments before the hordes came through the gate. It was an event which brought 1800 visitors on one day each year, and a significant swelling to the coffers, which we ploughed back into making it a better place to visit. All the plants on display here could be seen growing in the garden.

The stalls were staffed by gardeners and volunteers. The notices on canes revealed our very simple pricing system. Each table had plants all at the same price. Each table was priced differently, according to size or difficulty in propagating for example. The only stall which was different was the one I am seen standing behind, and which was my domain - the speciality plants. These were the ones which required more detailed information before being sold, cultural instructions etc., or perhaps a bit of a persuasive sales pitch to bring out their special qualities. These were individually priced. I derived huge pleasure from the public contact provided by this day, even though it was exhausting.

In our tea-room, with its highly restricted facilities, they felt the pinch even more. I happen to know that my favourite tea-room manager reads this blog. Due to the time difference it is even possible that she sometimes reads it nearly 12 hours before I publish it, which is a feat not achieved by many. I am sure she will vouch for how stressful it could be on busy days in their tiny, overheated kitchen, running around serving to outside tables, with the power tripping out and the boiler dwindling to a dribble. But we're still friends. Aren't we?