The Royal Horticultural Society is like the Church of England. It seems always to have been there, a fixed, reassuring point in a changing world. Even to those who do not belong to it, it seems a Good Thing and it is hard to imagine national life without it. Among those who know it, it inspires affection and exasperation in about equal measure and, like the C of E, it is troubled.
In early September, the director-general of the RHS, Inga Grimsey, suddenly resigned and will leave next January. The resulting media attention alerted the world to the fact that the directorate was halfway through a ‘restructure’, cutting 10 per cent of salary costs, a loss equivalent to 80 full-time posts. This cut (following an earlier pay freeze) was intended to restore the recession-hit annual operating surplus of £3.3 million.
At the same time, the media got a whiff of how worried gardeners and other employees were about losing their jobs, or of having their roles redefined and untenably expanded, and how they resented the way the directorate was going about the process.
The RHS is a charity and also, importantly, a Learned Society. For most of its history, the membership and administration have been small and wieldy. When I worked at Wisley in 1975, it was referred to as the ‘Surrey Horticultural Society’ and there were 67,000 members. That changed after the 1985 Ridley report, which recommended a regionalisation programme. It now has four gardens rather than one, and 363,000 members. It has a wide, arguably too wide, range of activities.
The members elect the 15-strong council of trustees, headed by a president, presently Giles Coode-Adams. The council’s job is to further the Society’s charitable aims, by devising strategy while ensuring good governance. It consists of an eclectic mixture of nurserymen, bankers, scientists, garden designers and garden owners. It meets only eight times a year. The council has always relied on specialist committees — made up of loyal, unpaid, sometimes put-upon experts — to judge shows, oversee plant trials and generally provide the necessary horticultural ballast. In recent years, the committees’ administrative functions have been handed to the directorate; they are now mainly advisory. (I was proud to serve on the Trials Advisory Committee but have resigned, in case I embarrassed its members by anything I wrote.) The Royal Charter states that ‘the government of the Society, and of its business and affairs, shall be vested in the council…’ To some, the senior directors now look less like servants to the council than equals. Of the ‘restructuring’, Giles Coode-Adams told me that the council and senior directors were ‘all at one that this was the right thing to do’. An amber light glowed in my head. Should not there always be a creative tension between those who set policy and the permanent officials who must deliver it? As Jim Hacker would say but Sir Humphrey would not.
The directorate is chiefly based at Vincent Square, Westminster. The world-class Lindley Library has its HQ here, with outliers at the four gardens: Wisley in Surrey, Rosemoor in Devon, Hyde Hall in Essex and Harlow Carr in Yorkshire. Membership, not surprisingly, is clustered around these gardens; 140 other gardens share a partnership arrangement with the RHS, with varying degrees of co-operation. Even so, in the provision of leisure destinations, the RHS cannot hope to compete with the National Trust.
What it can do is provide expert advice, and carry out important scientific research and plant trials, particularly at Wisley. Results are reported in the monthly journal, The Garden, and on the website. The RHS trains students, sets public examinations, has a ‘campaign for schools’ and hands out awards. It runs not only Chelsea Flower Show but also several large regional flower shows, which it either started or took over, such as Tatton Park and Hampton Court. It organises Britain in Bloom.
The RHS’s income is £64.5 million but it is thoroughly stretched. The shows just break even and, although visits to the gardens have picked up this season, the trading arm has been badly affected by the recession. There is no major sponsor yet signed up for Chelsea or Hampton Court next year. The Society’s success in doubling membership numbers between 1995 and 2005 encouraged it to think it could do a great many things, but the recession has brought it down to earth with a bump. The present membership drive is faltering; numbers are the same as in 2004. Subscriptions (now £44 a year) essentially pay for the upkeep of the gardens — about half of total expenditure.
Specialist societies, like the RHS, have to square the circle between their intrinsic purposes and how they raise the money to fulfill them. Priorities are as slippery to handle as wet bars of soap. An operating surplus is obviously prudent, but acquiring it by losing so many staff has proved costly, in human and PR terms. The president hopes that the restructure — ‘a horrible process’ about which he is ‘desperately sorry’ — will prove to be the low point.
The cuts are to be equal in percentage terms across all departments, but that presupposes that they are of equal value, and involves real risk if there has been no clear-eyed assessment of priorities. For me, the success of the RHS’s core activities depends, ultimately, on its horticultural excellence (as the president himself insists), yet there is understandable anxiety that, at the end of this process, there will not be enough of the right people in the right place to achieve it.
So what of the members, the third side of this scalene triangle, whose subscriptions come up for renewal in December? To what extent does the Society offer them something in return for their money and to what extent does it ask them to support something which is simply good in itself? What members get for their sub is essentially: free entry to the gardens; a monthly magazine; access to expert advice; and the opportunity to pay quite a lot of money to get into Chelsea on Members’ Days. The extent to which they know about the RHS’s less obvious work is a moot point. For me, despite present difficulties, the Society remains a worthy cause and I intend to renew my membership.
Although the recession has caused a very painful, if unavoidable, process of retrenchment, it also presents an opportunity for those who make policy to take a fresh look at what the RHS is for, where its true priorities lie and whether it has the right structure of governance. The Society was founded, in 1804, for the ‘encouragement and improvement of the science, art and practice of horticulture in all its branches’ — a dauntingly wide-ranging and serious mission. Two hundred years later, it needs to articulate to the wider public a clear vision of what this means, in a way people, including presently demoralised RHS staff, can understand and buy into.
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