country life
Island Life - April/May 2011
When Simon Goodenough announced
that after 25 years as curator of
Ventnor Botanic Gardens he was opting
for voluntary redundancy the shock was
if anything greater than the news the
Council was pulling its funding. But
Simon’s decision was no fit of peak:
“If I’d stayed my salary would have
meant we’d have had to lose even more
gardeners to make the cuts. My big
fear was that if the horticultural staff
were reduced right down to a couple of
gardeners, then the whole essence of
the science, of the important collections
that we have here, would be very
quickly taken apart.”
Thanks in part then to Simon’s big
gesture, the Isle of Wight Council
has revised its plan and
will now be pulling out
more slowly, enabling an
alternative management
structure to be put in place.
Jobs will be cut, yes, but the
gardens will survive under
the stewardship of Chris
Kidd, who has been Head
Gardener for the past 10
years.
Perhaps it is logical
that Simon should fall on
his sword for the sake of
Ventnor Botanic Gardens:
it is after all very much his
baby. “Just after I started
here the gardens were
completely devastated by
the ’87 storm. I’ve seen it
through from nothing to
what we have now.”
Out of the seeming tragedy of
the storm he began to put in place
a long-term plan. “Oh I cried all the
crocodile tears I needed to, to get the
money coming in!” he grins. “What
it enabled me to do was to shape the
garden along botanical lines – because
actually it had no right to call itself
a botanic garden, just a collection of
unusual plants.”
What the rare plants had shown
was the location had an incredible
microclimate combined with alkaline
soil, and the collection is unrivalled
because of it. Simon’s idea, which he
sold relentlessly to any Rotary Club or
townswomen’s guild who would hear
him speak, was to put plants from
climactic zones together, to show
people what the habitats of different
geographic areas looked like, while
making it a draw not only for Islanders
but for tourists. “It’s about taking a
journey through the world,” he says.
Applying for funding from the
Millennium Commission for a visitor’s
centre was a crowning moment for the
gardens, for with it came Chris and two
extra gardeners.
“I had a terrific injection of ideas
from Chris on how we were going to
develop the plantings. He got a lot of
grants and bequests and we improved
the Mediterranean terrace into a
hillside, before turning our attention
to South Africa and Australia – quite
contentious at the time because of the
way we built it – and then we moved
back into the scree garden and got
money to develop that.”
That Chris Kidd is a Kew-trained
horticulturalist is vital to the continuity
of the garden’s future, Simon says. For
while the general public wandering
might not realise it, the plants are the
living equivalent of a museum collection
which need the deft hand of the
horticulturalist to ensure their upkeep.
Chris and Simon have proved quite
a double act over the years. “I’d give
Chris a really mad idea, he’d expand on
it, then I’d be a human shield when all
at the Council was going mental and
let Chris just get on with it!” He adds:
“Chris is definitely the person I’m really
comfortable with taking it forward.”
The other ingredient which has
proved imperative has been the
Friends’ Society, a group he set up
long ago to support his vision for the
gardens. When we spoke, Simon had
just emerged from the first meeting
between the Friends and the proposed
advisory group, and was full of praise
for the stalwart supporters.
“The Friends have been an incredible
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force for good in the gardens: they
promote it, they’ve applied for grants,
and been instrumental in enabling many
of the developments over the past 10
years to go ahead. All the new gardens
have been kick started by direct funding
or matched funding from the friends.”
As a case in point, Simon has just
requested a sum of £5,000 from the
Friends for plants to replace those
which succumbed to the recent dire
weather. After the unanimous vote
agreeing to his request the Friends’
treasurer, Jean Kelley, stressed that the
gardens should be seen to be carrying
on, and funds painstakingly raised by
the Friends are exactly for this purpose.
All in all, Simon says, being free
of the shackles of being
part of the local authority
can only, ultimately, be a
good thing. “It’s been an
incredible encumbrance to
be part of a local authority.
Beyond the Island there is no
sense of the gardens being
something special. Because
it’s a Council-run public open
space it’s often