Thirty Years and Counting

Fergus has been the head gardener since 1993 and CEO of the Great Dixter Charitable Trust. We visited Great Dixter on the 6th of April, 12th, and 16th of May, 2023.

"I love the physical nature of the work and going home tired at the end of the day."

What is your background, and how did you become interested in horticulture?

Fergus.  My mother was Turkish, my father was English, and I was born in Brighton. My mother didn’t see a future with my father and took us back to Istanbul. I was six months old, and my brother was a year older than me. My mother was a teacher, working as a team representing the Turkish Host Nation and Culture at an American Air Force base. We went to school at the base where my mother taught. She was a very elegant, cultured lady who was deeply interested in Turkish history and culture. She was a great cook, loved art, cinema, books, and we were immersed in all this.

We lived on the Asian side of Istanbul, right by the sea. Later, we moved across the Sea of Marmara to a sleepy seaside resort called Yalova. My grandmother looked after us as my mother worked. She was a great gardener; she grew many colourful, interesting things, and people came from all over to see her garden. She picked and cut flowers for them and handed them out. She was very generous and loved chatting to passers-by. I loved her and so spent many hours helping her with the garden. But I never considered myself a gardener or connected to the land that way. I was an outdoor person, loved being in the Turkish countryside, was in and out of the sea daily, and loved playing sports.

My mother brought us back to the UK to finish our schooling. We lived in Brighton, and I went to school in Hove; this was OK. I played a lot of sports and enjoyed my time there. I took several O levels and then went on to take A levels.

The first significant person I met outside of my family was my geography teacher at my secondary school. He was called Mr Balsdon and taught geography at Blatchington Mill School. He had a very unusual way of teaching, and he was fascinating. We studied geology and human geography and concentrated on parts of the world like West Africa, which fascinated me. I was also interested in maths and chemistry and became deeply interested in the natural world. I didn’t see much of my father, who was also in Brighton, but he got us a subscription to the Natural Geographic magazine. So I became even more fascinated by the natural world and a growing interest in agriculture and how people grew food.

Mr Balsdon suggested that I study agriculture at university. I was not very academically driven but was fascinated by the natural world. I was focused on playing sports and careers teachers never directed me. But my geography teacher made all the difference by pointing me in the right direction. He said I should attend Wye College because it’s international and the best place to study agriculture. I’d never considered becoming a farmer, and the idea appealed to me. So I applied and got accepted. Wye was a small college between Canterbury and Ashford in Kent affiliated with London University and had a long history of teaching agriculture.

I went but found it was the wrong subject for me. But because I had a Turkish connection, I was put into a halls of residence which had lots of students from Cameroon, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Senegal, and Nigeria. I loved being amongst them, loved their culture and their food. I enjoyed the social life, but in terms of agriculture, it was all about high input, high output, and that didn’t make sense. By then, there were many butter mountains and milk lakes; then, there were other parts of the world where people were starving.

I decided to leave the course, return to Brighton, and have a good time. I enjoyed partying, but my director of studies said, ‘You’ve got exceptionally high marks in soil science and tropical science. It would be a shame if you stepped away, why don’t you try another course?’ So, I said, ‘OK’, here’s my opportunity, ‘Can I do rural environmental studies?’ But that didn’t work with my first-year subjects. The course that stood out to him was horticulture. So, I asked what horticulture is. ‘He said it’s gardening, garden design, history, etc.’ I thought, as my grandmother was a great gardener; I should try this.

By then, I’d met a girl and fallen in love, and we have now been together 40 or so years, married with two daughters. She was part of the reason I stayed at college, and I decided to give horticulture a go. They found me a space on a course taught by Dr Tom Wright, and then the term ended. So, I went and partied down in Brighton and was late returning to the second year of the course. Tom was furious with me, and I was nearly thrown out. I was used to being told off at that point but really did not have many boundaries in my life.

Did you know by this stage that you’d made the right decision by swapping courses to do horticulture?

Fergus.  I went to a class Dr Tom Wright gave on designing a garden. I didn’t have a clue how to do this, but I was artistic and put a drawing together. The next time I went to that class, I was given a mark of 100% for my design, and Tom held it up in front of the class and said, I’m not expecting anybody to draw to this standard, but this is an exceptional drawing, use of space, and so on. That was the first time since Mr Balsdon anybody had said well done, and that moment inspired me.

I’ve an obsessive mentality; I decided to learn about plants and not just from a book. I need to know how to work with that plant and its life cycle. I’d still party like mad in the evenings but also visit the library regularly. I pushed myself to learn; for example, about every Sea Holly that existed, where it came from, and how it grows. I have a stamp collector’s mentality of learning. With work, I gradually picked up knowledge; the creativity was already there, it came from my artistic mother, and as a result, I was pretty successful on the course.

By now, my tutor Tom and I were very close friends, and he brought his students to Great Dixter on a field trip because back when he studied at Wye College, his tutor was Christopher Lloyd. Christopher had also read modern languages at Cambridge, which the war interrupted when he went off to do his military service. Afterwards, he studied horticulture at Wye, where he got his Degree. After that, he worked in the industry at a nursery for a while before Wye College called him back to become part of the teaching staff. So Tom kept close contact with Christopher. And every year, Tom would bring his students to Great Dixter, and I was one of those students.

I wasn’t a conventional horticultural student; I had red hair and looked quite bohemian. But I always had a notebook, and I used to draw things. Christo (Christopher) was fascinated by people with a notebook because he always thought they were taking it seriously. So, he asked what I was writing, and I told him, ‘I liked the shape of the flower’, and I was drawing it and making a note of the combination of the two colours. Christo said ‘That’s interesting’. He looked up at me and said, ‘Is that your natural hair colour?’ And I said, ‘No, I’ve dyed it with henna’; this bemused him, he just laughed, and we carried on talking.

I had a very close friend called Neil Ross at college who was an extraordinary student, gifted, knowledgeable and very much into garden history. He used to be invited by Christo for weekends at Great Dixter. So one time, Christo asked Neil to invite me as well. It was great; the place was full of potters, gardeners and military friends of Christos, just a real mix of people. There was no TV at Great Dixter; you just drank, ate, walked around the garden, and discussed whatever. I enjoyed it and returned a few times for weekends.

By then, I had become a serious student but needed more practical experience, so I took time out of college and went to the parks department for more practical experience. I was working for Brighton Council, and that was during the great storm of 1987. I gradually built up experience, hungry for everything, and if someone asked me to do something, I jumped at it. At the same time, I continued to build up knowledge of habitats and plants. I was obsessed, and I knew many more plants then than I know now, but I know how to work with them now.

What happened after your graduation?

Fergus.  I got my Degree and started looking for a job. I wrote to Rosemary Alexander, who runs the English Gardening School, and she was at a National Trust property called Stoneacre near Maidstone in Kent then. I got a summer job there helping restore Stoneacre, including dry stone walling, planting out, and chainsaw work. I did quite a lot of building; it was very physical, and that satisfied me, the physical nature of the job because it took over my love of the sport.

I kept in touch with Christo, visited Great Dixter regularly, and met gardeners, designers and many people. I completed my summer stint at Stoneacre and was asked by a family to work on a property in the south of France and Switzerland, travelling between the two. That was amazing; I was suddenly in different climates in southern France and Switzerland. So there could be a 25° difference between the two places and a completely different range of plants and plants adapting differently to extreme climates.

I became interested in Turkish flora, and a job came up in Turkey with the Fauna and Flora Preservation Society. It involved saving Snowdrops. Big commercial growers were paying Turkish villages to collect Snowdrops from the wild; they were pillaged from the wild and then shipped to Holland and sold to British gardens. It wasn’t sustainable for the villagers who were being exploited; they would take from the fields around them the first year and then the fields beyond that. By year five, they’d taken everything from around them, and the company would move on. The project involved getting the villagers to grow Snowdrops and Cyclamen as a crop. I felt strongly about this but didn’t get that job because I needed botanical training.

"I wanted to be that craftsman constantly learning, hands in the soil, learning, experimenting and passing that knowledge and experience on."

"I used to run 10 miles every other day, and I thought, rather than doing that, I’m just going to put all that energy into work and worked tirelessly."

Out of the blue, Christo offered me the job of head gardener at Great Dixter. He wanted somebody to put some energy into the position. I had done bits of everything up to this point, and I wanted to be connected to plants in the wild. So, I turned Christopher down; he was furious and phoned me and said, ‘I don’t know why you’ve turned me down, come and talk to me’. So, we met, and I said I felt connected to Turkey and wanted to work there with plants. So, he said, ‘If you get a job with me, you can go to Turkey whenever you want.’ I ummed and ahhed a bit, and then he said, look, you love Great Dixter, we are friends, and I’d love you to be a part of this place. We both want the same thing for the garden, so why don’t you join me? So I said ‘Yes’ in 1992, but I started working in 1993. I was only 26, relatively young for a head gardener for a prominent place like this.

I was worried that we were friends and I’d had all these lovely times at Dixter where you were entertaining or entertained in a unique atmosphere. And if I work at Great Dixter, the atmosphere is bound to change when reality hits, and the hard work starts. But it didn’t change; it just got better, and Christo got better. He could be a difficult person. He was for many people, but he was just misunderstood. Christo was the most generous person I have encountered. He was very kind, thoughtful, sensitive, brilliant in many ways, artistic and creative in his combinations, and had a big brain. I loved him as a friend and regarded him as part of my family.

I always remembered that Great Dixter was Christo’s garden. We’d work together, and he was perfectly OK with me questioning things, but it was his final decision. We worked in partnership, he was like a father/grandfather figure to me, and we had a deep friendship.

In terms of me, at Great Dixter, I wasn’t interested in having my name in lights. I was interested in increasing my plant knowledge and the art of gardening craft. I wanted to be the most effective in all the tasks, from sowing seeds to pricking out, to pruning and staking and all the practical ways behind good gardening. I wanted to garden in such a way that it all looked and felt natural as well as exciting and artisticly expressing myself in terms of form and colour.

How did your position at Great Dixter develop and change with Christopher and post-Christopher?

Fergus.  When I first came here, Christo was happy to have a drink every lunchtime. I said, ‘No, I’m here to work’. I wanted to be like a sponge; I facilitated in the garden and the house; I just took it all in, even how he answered the phone or dealt with the post. Then I started being a part of all that, maximising Christo’s writing time when he wasn’t out in the garden. I facilitated all that for the first five years while adding my suggestions and taking in everything.

By year six, we would share the decision much more. Christopher had absolute trust in me, so he’d say, you come up with a combination, but I’d always bring it to him and say, I’m thinking of putting this together. And he may pull it apart, add to it, or say, go ahead, it may work.

Christopher died in 2006, and I worked alongside him as his head gardener for 13 years. In the last few years, he let me take more and more of the creative decision because he trusted me. I became increasingly interested in running the business; he became frailer, which meant he was doing less gardening. Nevertheless, we managed to take the garden to higher levels even though we had limitations in budget.

A brilliant man called Tom Cooper ran North American Horticulture Magazine; he is now one of our trustees. Tom connected British and North American horticulture gardening. He asked me to lecture about our work at Great Dixter, which I eventually decided to do, and that was a breakthrough because that money came back to Dixter and helped to fund students and projects.

I started doing the occasional lecture. I can’t say that I found it altogether comfortable, but Great Dixter is an easy subject to talk about. It’s colourful; there is a high impact from the planting. Also, what we do is complex, so there’s a story there, and I started lecturing on different subjects. I remember talking at Kew about working out Christo’s planting style and what people like Beth Chatto did, and somebody in the audience said ‘I would love you to write a book on that.’ I’m not a writer, so I spoke with Christo.

I told him about the book idea, plus we needed to raise money for the Yeoman’s Hall repairs. I showed Christo the lecture about how every good gardener plants layers. And he said, I can write that book, put a list of the headings down with a list of plants, and I’ll write it, and he did, and the funds repaired the building. And that book is Succession Planting for Adventurous Gardeners.

"It’s always difficult in this job to try and balance everything because you could lecture, write and be in the office, and that’s it. But, at the same time, I need to be hands-on and gardening. Then you can write and teach from experience and always bring new things to the table."

Have you ever lived at Great Dixter?

Fergus.  Christo was very fond of my wife, Amanda; she’s a zoologist. They would talk about insects, birds and those sorts of things which they were both very knowledgeable about. When Amanda was expecting our first child Christo asked, ‘Why don’t you come to live here? I haven’t had a family life for a while, and I’d love you to be here; you are part of my family’.

At that point, Christo went to the doctor with knee problems. Then he went into the hospital to have his knees operated on. So we thought we’d be able to help him when he got home, but there were complications; he went in, came out and returned to the hospital a few more times. Then he never came out again.

Amanda and I moved into the house as the dust settled and stayed for about three months. But it didn’t feel right for several reasons. First, Christo had gone, I was CEO and raising money for Great Dixter, and I thought, there’s a conflict of interest if I live in the house while raising money for it. So we moved back into our home and thought the house should be full of students and have its own life.

Looking to the future, is there a succession plan?

Fergus.  The great thing about Great Dixter is that it’s always invested in people. When Christo died, I thought it had to have a raison d’être. It can’t just grow fat on its name; it’s an inspirational garden, but is that enough? So I turned it into a place of learning for gardeners. Christo set up a trust before he died, and the Trustees fully backed our investment into training; even during a recession, we never cut back on education.

We have trained a steady flow of gardeners; some are doing excellent jobs as head gardeners at other places now. If I look at that scene, probably three of those gardeners could replace me tomorrow. They’ve got a love and understanding for the spirit of Great Dixter, which is essential. They won’t pick up one of Christo’s books and copy a planting plan because that would be the wrong thing for Dixter. It’s never been static like that. They understand the creativity, the dynamic nature, and the giving spirit of this place. Invest in people, and then it will all slot together.

So, Great Dixter had a Biodiversity Audit Report over recent years; tell us about that.

Fergus.  It is extraordinary for Great Dixter to sit on a list amongst all those nature reserves and places of scientific interest known to be rich in biodiversity. There is a misconception that gardens are not good for wildlife. It is true that there is non-native planting, but that doesn’t mean that gardens don’t support wildlife. There have been lots of studies which show gardens to be exceptionally biodiverse.

We did a Biodiversity Audit on Great Dixter. The first ecologists we invited said it’s just a garden, so we’re not really interested. So we paid them to do the audit and compare it to the countryside around us. The countryside around us is bound to be rich with its pasture land and ancient woodlands. But the garden’s much richer. They said you may think the countryside is feeding the garden, but it’s the other way around. There are remnants of flora and fauna that would’ve been in the countryside 400 years ago. Our lead ecologist told me, I’ve been doing biodiversity audits for 30-odd years, and this is one of the richest places I’ve ever been to.

We have 17 of the 22 species of bumblebee here; that’s as good as you’ll get, not that it’s a numbers game. We can create these colourful artistic spaces but still be soft on the environment. And, of course, that goes with being aware of our carbon footprint in a place like this and how much energy and water we use. We haven’t used herbicides or pesticides for many years now.

The mosaic structure at Great Dixter is very relevant to urban and suburban spaces. Paving, long grass, short grass, porous buildings, water, trees and woodland edge, every space matters. So, what we’ve got here is present in many towns and cities. So, why aren’t our towns and cities also diverse if we are diverse?

"It was wonderful to realise we are not only custodians of the land and this historical place but of all those insects and little creatures, that microcosm of life that makes up this space."

Fergus Garrett VMH
Horticulturist, Educator & Head Gardener
CEO of the Great Dixter Charitable Trust

Great Dixter House & Gardens
Northiam, East Sussex TN31 6PH
www.greatdixter.co.uk
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