‘Maintenance is a profession which should be valued’
11 October 2011
In 1997, Gill Chamberlain took the bold decision to leave the IT industry, where she was a Senior International Business Manager, to follow her passion for gardening.
She trained at Writtle Agricultural College and then spent two years as a student gardener at Cambridge University Botanic Gardens. During her tenure at Cambridge she started Garden Rescue an innovative idea to offer her services as a roving head gardener. Over the last 10 years Gill has looked after large country gardens; designing, developing, renovating and managing existing staff.
Gill opened by saying; “Maintenance is a profession which should be valued. If clients are going to invest in a garden, it can be the price of another car or house for some of us, then to realise that
investment you need key people to look after it. A garden starts when it is planted and that the design should have the ability, capacity and the desire of the garden owners to maintain it as an integral part of the original design. This includes the clients themselves, garden staff and people hired in.”
Gap in the market
“Like many of you my interest in gardening started when I was young but it wasn’t until 15 years ago that I understood I could learn a living by doing something I loved.”
Gill described having found a ‘gap in the market’ when she formed her business as a roving head gardener; “ I realised there was a big gap between the garden designer and garden owner and I could fill that gap.”
Gill described a number of long term clients whose gardens she has looked after for a number of years, keeping them; “looking good, upgrading or developing the garden and plantings to their taste or
particular requirements at that moment.” Most of Gill’s client
own or manage large country gardens ranging from one or two to 35 acres. She often comes in to a garden to rescue it after
maintenance of the space has been neglected, or misunderstood,
and she also begins work on spaces from scratch too.
“I think that as an industry we’re missing a trick‐ we need to
educate clients and non gardeners that proper gardening and maintenance is a very skilled thing – and if you employ skilled people the garden will evolve (things need to be replaced and updated) but you have to pay people appropriately, not £5 an hour. People think that gardeners can be paid £5 an hour – this isn’t appropriate for designed gardens. Most people think of a garden maintenance chap as someone who cuts thing back and mows lawns and that’s it; proper maintenance is incredibly skilled. I put together a list of the skills needed to properly maintain a garden and it runs to pages.”
Gill explained that the job of good maintenance was something that required ‘great skill’ in order to maintain something of the original design or intent. She made a plea to all designers and landscape architects present to make Maintenance plan a paid‐for element of the original design.
Communication
Gill pointed to ‘communication’ as absolutely key if a designer wanted the garden they designed to go on to live a full life, in the form it was originally designed.
“A design cannot reach its potential without the right care and maintenance – and without a detailed maintenance plan. Designers have a responsibility to design gardens that people can actually look after. I think over a third of my business in the early days would come from me being called in after designers had built a beautiful garden, but hadn’t actually spoken to the clients about how it should be looked after. “
Gill went further than Andy Sturgeon and suggested that the plan should be as detailed as possible, and tailored to each garden. Watering guides should be very specific. She said: “Watering means
different things to different people – watering can mean a teaspoon or it can mean putting the irrigation on for 4 days. I’ve had clients who didn’t water enough in the summer – and the plants were
literally screaming at me – and I’ve had clients who have left the irrigation on and literally drowned plants in the winter. We need to sit down and explain what we mean by ‘watering’. “
The future
Gill closed by saying; “One of the greatest challenges is to really think about ‘the future’ of the garden we’re designing.” Gill encouraged the audience to view maintenance as a skilled job that required proper wages and as something that called a huge ‘value’ for both the client and the industry at large.
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