Contents
4 Introduction
5 Geoff Hamilton - the making of a super-gardner
27 Geoff's working life - the rocky road to stardom
56 The gardens of Barnsdale
104 Geoff's dream comes to life - Nick and Sue open the gates
124 Practical projects - Ideas for your garden
129 Barnsdale Gardens guide
Geoff's working life
...the rocky road to Stardom
Once his course at Writtle Agricultural College had finished,
dad stayed on for a while working as a technician before setting
out on his own, as getting married had spurred him on to greater
things and he felt that landscape gardening was his calling.
Living in Wormley, he was only a short distance from the affluent
areas of north London and it was here that he felt he would be
able to generate most work. This might sound like a match made
in heaven but he couldn’t just get in there do the job and
get out, he had to do the best job that he possibly could and this
was typified on many occasions when he would say to any of us boys: “If
a job’s worth doing then it’s worth doing well”.
Mind you, his first design and landscape job was not the most
auspicious or imaginative piece of work, but things improved at
a great rate as he learned valuable lessons ‘on the job’. This philosophy
was very admirable and one that you would encourage your children
to follow, as he did with us, but only if your quote has allowed
for this extra time spent ensuring that the finished product is
of the highest standard. He was having to compete with landscapers
who were dashing in, doing a poor job, grabbing the money and disappearing
but who set a low price level that many had to quote to in order
to get work, especially when starting out.
His low income was further compounded by the reluctance of clients
to part with their money. It seemed that the more money a client
had, the harder it was for dad to prise it out of their palms,
even when he presented them with a top quality garden.
Life was hard at home with three growing boys and little money,
so he teamed up with another landscaper, Martin Frost, with whom
he built gardens at the Chelsea Flower Show. The credentials that
my father now had were more than most landscapers could hope for
in a lifetime of work, but this still did not equate to a rise
in income or prompt payment for work done.
Reluctantly, he left landscaping saying that, because of the
constant knocking on people’s doors trying to encourage them to pay
up, he had begun feeling more like a debt collector than a landscaper.
He went to work for his father, selling materials to the engineering
industry, and it was while driving to a factory that he stumbled
across a derelict garden centre on the outskirts of Kettering in
Northamptonshire. He could immediately see the potential in this
site: it was on the edge of a new estate and, with his expertise
as a horticulturalist, a business there could not fail. He came
back, persuaded my mother that this was a brilliant idea and that
it was going to solve all our money worries and then went out and
bought it (well, the bank bought it on his behalf).
The garden centre
The site consisted of a near-derelict shop and a rickety old greenhouse
and that was about it, so he started to rebuild it on his own,
as there were no funds to employ tradesmen to help. I remember
him coming home late one evening after laying many square yards
of paving and noticed his hands; he had worked them smooth so
he no longer had any fingerprints. It was suggested that he could
moonlight as a burglar, because he would leave no trace of who
it was but, as usual, he had already thought of that, because
he came straight back with the point that the police would then
look for a man with smooth hands, namely him.
He worked all hours, every day to get the garden centre up and
running with a nicely fitted-out shop, sales beds for plants, a
reconstructed greenhouse for houseplants, display pond, and plenty
of hardstanding areas for composts as well as paved pathways. It
was a real credit to his hard work.
The day before the grand opening two rectangular signs went up,
one either side of the entrance, each having a yellow tulip outline
on a green square at one end, with ‘The Hamilton Garden Centre’ covering
the rest. It was a very proud moment for everyone and things started
promisingly. He grew a lot of the plants he sold himself and was
enjoying life, especially as his customers now gave their money
to him before they left. Things were going so well that he was
thinking about expanding, growing more plants himself so that he
could cut down even more on the number of plants he bought in and
even supplying local landscapers with their requirements.
He had found a house for sale about four miles away, in a small
village called Weekly, that had some land as well as a couple of
polythene tunnels already erected, since it had been used as a
small market garden. This seemed to be the perfect answer to his
expansion plans and, after another very productive meeting with
his bank manager, he bought it. Dad had, by this time, also started
to write the odd freelance article for Garden News, a weekly gardening
newspaper.
On reading a copy of the paper he had one of his grand thoughts
again, thinking ‘I can do that’, so he bought a cheap
second-hand typewriter and set about writing two articles in his
best Queen’s English. The words seemed to rattle through
the typewriter with ease and it was not long before he had two
perfect articles to send off. The Garden News technical editor,
Geoff Amos, liked what dad had written and asked him to write some
more… and there began the journalistic career of one Geoff
Hamilton. We all have Geoff Amos to thank for dad’s break
into the media, as it was he who saw the potential in a raw young
writer with an easy-to-read style and who would undoubtedly move
on to much greater things. Dad was very lucky in his life to stumble
across the right people at the right time, and Geoff Amos was certainly
a man of great foresight.
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A gardening legend