There’s something bad lurking in the undergrowth in a large number of gardens. Something worse than any disease, more destructive than any pest. It’s a problem that is eating away at the very roots, something that will likely cause a lot of damage in the coming years.
Money. Or more accurately the lack of it.
What Makes A Garden?
People make gardens; without human intervention there would be no gardens. Nature would quickly reclaim gardens and parks as its own. This might not be such a bad idea given how badly wildlife is doing in most parts of the world at the moment; maybe gardens should be sacrificed in the name of a greater good?
Weeds start small but can take over
To quote the final stanza of Sara Teasdale’s There Will Come Soft Rains,
“And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.”
We must remember that gardens are not wild spaces and never will be, no matter how much we try. They exist for the pleasure of people, but also for the purpose of keeping nature in check around buildings and infrastructure. Without gardening we would have trees growing everywhere and vines holding us prisoner in our homes. Taking control of nature’s processes, however benevolently, is gardening.
And key to the human connection with a garden are gardeners.
Money
Professional gardeners are not usually greedy by nature. It’s just as well really because unless you’re one of the elite this is not a career you’ll get rich from. Gardeners need to eat and pay their bills though.
Dave Bouch, Head Gardener at Cotehele in the UK, sharing his knowledge with other gardeners
The craft of horticulture is at risk of being axed to save money in the fairly short term. Businesses and organisations are making economies in these challenging times, and horticulture is an easy thing to cut it seems.
Increasingly gardens are relying on volunteers to do work of paid gardeners. If people are willing to give their time why shouldn’t a managers take advantage of that to cut costs? Volunteers get to enjoy time in the garden and the managers get to balance the books. It’s a win-win situation, unless you’re one of the gardeners losing their jobs.
Volunteers vs Gardeners
It’s a short sighted approach, a temporary sticking plaster solution to what is a complex economic problem.
Gardens like this at Cotehele need and deserve dedicated gardeners
Many, most, gardeners put their hearts and souls into the gardens they care for. It’s a heart-and-soul occupation; a casual interest in gardens, plants and gardening isn’t going to get you through the challenges of the job. A not-insubstantial number of people come into horticulture, often gaining qualifications beforehand, only to drop out when they realise that their idealised impression of horticulture as a career does not match up to reality.
Do a day strapped to a large brushcutter on a sunny day, with biting insects out for their pound of flesh, and you’ll see what gardening can be like! Yes you try to arrange jobs to suit the conditions but sooner or later you just have to endure whatever comes your way.
It’s not a bad career but gardeners are made of tough stuff. So are some volunteers, but the big difference with volunteers is that they can come and go as they please. It’s not unusual for places with dozens of volunteers to have only one person show up when it’s raining hard or sunny and very hot. That’s if anyone shows up at all.
Volunteering should be like that though. People are donating their time and it’s right that they should donate what time they want to, when they want to.
Crash!
Gardens reliant on volunteers are heading for trouble.
There has been a dramatic decline in volunteer numbers in the last few years. Some people got out of the habit of volunteering during the covid pandemic, while in other cases people have simply found other things to do. Some volunteers have just reached an age where they no longer have the physical strength to go out to work, and those who would replace them have other priorities in their lives.
Marwood Hill, UK, is a lovely garden when it’s sunny
There are gardens that have become so reliant on volunteers that they’re in trouble. They don’t have the paid gardeners to rely on, having cut back on jobs to save money, but they’re struggling to recruit and retain volunteers.
Slave Labour
Nobody who donates their time wants to be put upon. They’re there to help but not to bail out a business or organisation. Sure they’ll come and help the gardeners but there’s a huge difference between lending a hand and having responsibility dumped on you.
You cannot leave a garden like RHS Wisley solely to volunteers
Places where the balance of responsibility has become skewed towards volunteers are struggling. A good number of people volunteer because they enjoy working alongside the gardeners, learn from them and do the job without having the responsibility. There’s a huge difference between helping and an unpaid job.
The nuance of this is lost on managers looking to save money.
Cutting Back
I wish I was using this title to discuss Leslie Buck’s excellent book of the same name, but here we’re discussing the pruning of people, not branches.
Most gardens are struggling with visitor numbers. An uncertain economy means that even fairly affluent people are watching their spending, and trips to gardens are a bit more of a luxury rather than a regular activity. Declining memberships, numbers of season ticket holders, and casual visitors means less revenue to fund the garden.
Less revenue means cutting back. Of course any place needs a team of managers to do important manager things, and there are always unavoidable costs like electricity and water to deal with. The obvious thing to cut back on is gardening.
The garden at Trebah, UK, needs lots of attention; this is partly because it’s a large space
A combination of a lack of understanding of just what is involved in maintaining a garden, coupled with the magic pill of volunteers, has put professional gardeners in a precarious position. With a tiny number of exceptions, I don’t see how much further gardens can afford to cut back their gardening teams.
I remember a Head Gardener telling me about a team of volunteers who misinterpreted the instruction to tidy a border that had been planted for winter interest. He wanted them to weed the border and do some very light tidying up, but instead they tidied the border by cutting everything back for winter and doing the weeding. He refused to get angry about it.
It wasn’t the fault of the volunteers that the gardeners were too thinly stretched to look in on them and see what they were up to.
Why Does This Matter?
What we’re seeing with cutbacks isn’t just the loss of gardening jobs but the erosion of gardening itself. We, we as individuals, get to enjoy big open gardens and gain inspiration from them, but the cutting back of gardening is going to leave gardens we love and cherish increasingly neglected.
Volunteers are donating their time; as such they are allowed to work as frequently or infrequently as they want. If it rains for weeks on end then volunteers are allowed to stay at home.
Managing a garden like Trelissick, UK, is easier if you keep on top of it all the time.
In a garden that relies heavily on free labour this could spell trouble. We all know what happens when gardens get neglected; it’s not just a matter of tidying them up, the lack of progress over a few weeks can mean a few months work to catch up.
No garden should be operating without the appropriate number of gardeners for the workload. If gardens want to save money on staff then they must either significantly change how a garden is managed, invest in equipment to aid efficiency where appropriate, or cut the size of the garden. Yes I’m saying that if finances are that bad then it would be appropriate to look at ways of cutting down the area of garden that needs to be looked after.
It is simply not sustainable to rely on free labour.
What Can We Do?
Professional gardeners need our help, as do the gardens they care for.
We need to look at ways to support the gardens that matter to us, trying if humanly possible to visit more often.
It would be a pity to lose those people who dedicate their lives to looking after rare trees, like this Kauri from New Zealand
It might be necessary to cause a fuss too. Managers cut down on gardening because they assume that visitors won’t complain. There’s an idea that everything is always fine in the garden, and that it’s not appropriate to complain when things aren’t right. We make allowances for a few weeds here and there, and a few jobs left undone, but how far can things go before we kick up a fuss?
Realistically we don’t fuss though; we write off a garden as no longer worth visiting and stop going. The problem that so many public gardens face is that the people managing them, the people in overall charge, lack the knowledge and interest to know what’s happening; they’re running a tourist attraction and that is that. They see figures on a balance sheet and go from there.
If we want beautiful gardens we must support those who dedicate their working lives to them
We must do what we can if we want gardens to continue at any sort of high standard. Gardens in so many places are already running on very low staff numbers, and degrading those numbers further risks a dramatic drop in standards.
And in the meantime let’s also make sure those who care for our favourite gardens are appreciated. A complementary word here and there is enormously appreciated by any gardener.
I find it interesting that the decision about what jobs can be replaced by volunteers are made by people who never see their own jobs in the replaceable category!
How very right you are.
You never seem to get volunteer accountants, although I have heard today about a retail shop asking for volunteers….
I have known accountants who volunteer to do the books for nonprofits and attorneys who have done the same.
But these are profit-making organisations. The National Trust and RHS both have impressive investment portfolios, and independent gardens are run as businesses.
Many years ago, our local civic garden center hosted a mini-course called the “Care and Feeding of Volunteers”. The center had a small professional staff but was mostly run by dedicated volunteers from area garden clubs and retirees. My friends and I were in our mid-30’s when we became reliable weekly garden volunteers. Most of us were fortunate at the time to give up careers established in our twenties to choose to be full time homemakers and community volunteers in our mid-30’s. Unfortunately, the economic and social climate in the USA today does not permit this lifestyle choice for many families. I’m now in my early 70’s and health issues make it a struggle to maintain my own property much less provide manual labor in a public garden. I do continue to serve as a docent and assist with educational programs.
My local garden club once cared for five public gardens in our immediate community. We had over 50 members, most aged 30-60 and a specific team of volunteers to help plant and maintain each garden. We now have fewer than 35 active members. The majority of us are aged 55-95 and no longer physically able to maintain the five gardens. We “donated” three of the five garden spaces back to the borough. The township could not afford to maintain them so the plantings were cut down and replaced with turf grass. It was sad, but our Horticultural Committee decided it was better to have two well maintained gardens than five overgrown public spaces.
We’ve found that younger people will often volunteer for a one time event, but are unable or unwilling to commit to a steady, permanent work schedule. Our garden club has had to increase fund raising efforts to help pay for the professional help needed to complete physical tasks that many of us are no longer able to perform. It’s a situation common among many of the garden clubs and public gardens in the USA.
This is the thing; society and life changes.
It must have been heartbreaking indeed, but what enormous courage to admit the way things are going.
Had the exact same thing happen with my gardening group in Michigan. We were a master gardener chapter and what we say happening was young woman who attended the training, got the master gardener certification but would not maintain their certification because they would not volunteer or attend the meetings.
Marian Coffin said that all a garden takes is money, manure, and maintenance. She was an early woman professional gardener and landscape architect, her friend was the DuPont who started Winterthur, and if she did not have a trust fund, she associated with a lot of people who did.
It seems like the old estates that are most successful in both business, maintenance, and horticultural skills are the ones that also educate: Longwood Gardens, Mount Cuba (more DuPonts), Great Dixter. Instead of volunteers, they have paying students. And thank goodness, as so much horticultural knowledge is in danger of going extinct.
Marian Coffin was right.
Relying on people paying you for a studentship can have some interesting side effects, but it is fundamentally important if horticulture is going to survive at a high level.
I must admit that your belief that it is understandable for volunteers to stay at home if it’s rainy, etc., rankles me. A volunteer, in my opinion, should honor that volunteer commitment as they would a paying job. Sure, decide up front how much you want to volunteer, but when you commit, then show up (unless you’re sick or there is an unforeseen emergency, obviously.) I’ve had my fill of volunteering alongside others that don’t show up more than half of the time they are supposed to, leaving me to work hours longer than I had committed to. With volunteers like that, who needs/wants volunteers? I freely admit, though, that my suggestion that gardens should be pickier about their volunteers might seem to exacerbate the problem. But I think it’s better to have 10 dependable, hardy volunteers, than 20 “fair weather” volunteers. At least with the former, you can actually determine what you can realistically manage in the garden.
I get what you’re saying, but people should have the freedom to allocate their donated time as they wish.
It’s definitely better to have dependable volunteers, but such people are few and far between. It’s not selfishness on their part, just reality of life.
Strangely, we like to visit and support gardens. So looking recently for gardens to visit we discovered most are closed when we are able to visit. And indeed, we are only open twice a month, in summer.
Gardeners can’t be expected to manage the gate as well, so is this an additional issue?
Complicated one, and something that will vary from place to place.
There are few places where the gardeners manage the gate, but there are often complex staffing issues around opening gardens to the public. Quite often the gardeners will be the site supervisors and first-aiders when a garden is open, hence why you will usually find at least one gardener working over a weekend in most gardens. There are advantages to not being open seven days a week even in places where there are lots of gardeners; unless the garden is enormous it makes it much easier to deal with bigger projects and certain jobs like spraying paths when you don’t have the public ambling around. RHS gardens open at 10am for this reason; it gives the gardeners a couple of hours each morning to do certain high-risk jobs (tree work, spraying, machinery work like mowing near main routes) before visitors arrive.
If a garden is struggling to keep visitor numbers up it’s often cheaper to just not be open than it is to employ people to be there on days that don’t bring in much gate revenue. It also allows the garden to run a lower number of gardeners because there are days when gardeners are not needed, so it creates flexibility when it comes to rotas etc.
Ben this reminds me of Elizabeth Licata’s article in Garden Rant, March 7, 2023. “When Some Gardens May Be Too Scary to Visit.” She is referring to the Crownshield Gardens created by Louise du Pont and husband Frank Crownshield. Created in the 1920s, they were neglected after Louise’s death. These overgrown, magnificent gardens are slated for restoration by the Hadley Museum. Check out the photos. This is how nature responds when there is no longer any gardeners.
Thank you for this post. I certainly agree with it. However, it started me thinking about my own garden. It’s about 1 1/2 acres, intensely planted. I love it. I have worked in it daily for many years. But now I simply cannot physically maintain the level of care I once did. So I believe you have given me permission to determine which sections I want to maintain and which to allow to “go wild”. I have felt so guilty not to weed and prune the whole place. Thank you for the idea of how to approach this.