What does it take to be a head gardener?

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I've just finished reading Life in the Gardeners' Bothy (Malthouse Press 2000) by Arthur Hooper, who, born in 1908, never wanted to be anything else but a gardener. After washing pots, sieving soil and washing greenhouses for his father, a head gardener himself, Arthur was sent off to Fonthill House at Tisbury in Wiltshire. As a bothy boy, he was right at the bottom of the hierarchy that had existed in all big gardens for generations. You started in the bothy as a journeyman; then, if you were good, you became foreman of a part of the garden – the glasshouses, the kitchen garden or the pleasure grounds.










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