The Gardener

Make sure your volume is on: "They ask 'Is that a real plant!'"

Show transcript

A good day… obviously I'm going to refer to our visitors. I mean, I believe we're sort of hovering 180 - 200,000 paid visits a year, which is an incredible amount for our beautiful, humble site. And a feather in the cap, undoubtedly, is to just be stopped by a visitor, a group of visitors, to talk to them. And they relay their experience to you of a particular plant, which means something to them. It might mean a plant which they've never seen before in their life, or indeed with the lily behind me. And they ask you, “Is that a real plant?” And it's those little snippets of everyday sort of informal contact, which sort of make it more special.

A bad day would be you find that you don't have the budget you wanted for some things, you are planning work and something - again this ’flexibility’- something that comes in, either on a cost basis or something else takes a priority, and it goes onto the back foot.

We've got currently the COVID-19 for sort of 10 weeks, three months… but I've gone through nine months of closure due to foot and mouth! That was quite a mean period to say, to say the least. So you've got to take the rough with the smooth, but undoubtedly it's a special site and it's a beautiful site and long may it remain so!