Sinking morale

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.