Put your best foot forward

By now most people with even a cursory knowledge of the horticulture know that it's not the best paid industry around, and this is mostly because the funding simply isn't there to pay more, in addition to organisations having the mentality that garden staff are somehow second rate employees (a fact reflected in wages between different parts of an organisation). The nation's gardens and parks are being tended by an ever dwindling number of employed gardeners, partly as a result of technology making it possible for one person to jobs more efficiently (such as large lawn mowers speeding up the task of mowing big lawns), but also because various financial problems have meant that staff have had to be cut.

The gap between the amount of work to be done and the number of gardeners available to do it is increasingly being plugged by an army of volunteers. These people give their time and energy to helping garden staff to maintain and develop gardens across the UK. Over the years many gardens, especially those run by the National Trust, the RHS and other organisations, have come to rely increasingly on goodwill, but is this willingness to take part and get stuck in actually endangering gardens?

Volunteers are vital in large gardens, but for good reasons?

Over the years I've heard some cracking stories about volunteers; a head gardener of a public garden (which will remain nameless) recently told me about sending a trusted team of volunteers to weed and generally tidy a border of plants which had been specifically grown for the winter interest of seedheads etc. Off he and his team went to work in another part of the garden, but when he came back he found that the volunteers had used their initiative and gone to the shed, picked up some hedge trimmers and cut the whole border back to bare earth. The head gardener telling me this was right to say that he couldn't get angry about it because the team acted without malice and were desperately trying to be helpful but, nonetheless, the winter interest of the border was noticeably absent for that year.

I've heard rants too; one RHS gardener (who again won't be named) got really annoyed that the gardeners increasingly felt that their role in the garden was just 'babysitting' volunteers, some of whom were incredibly able (and sometimes had to be stopped from going too far!) while others seemed to be volunteering simply as a way to pass the time and managed to cause more work than they were doing. Some volunteers were raring to go, while others wanted to doss around all day, but both required the supervision of a gardener.

Even the RHS relies heavily on volunteers to maintain gardens.

Now of course we have two different issues here; the gardeners who cut down the border when they shouldn't have had made an error of judgement which could easily have been made by a new or inexperienced paid gardener, while the rant from the RHS gardener is more about the relationship between gardeners and volunteers when organisations are using free labour to avoid paying staff. The common issue between both stories is supervision. Paid gardeners often have to be the ones who use machinery and do the more dangerous jobs for safety (for that read 'insurance') reasons, but if you take on volunteers you're at the mercy of a lot of variables.

The people who sign up to become volunteers may be incredibly skilled and experienced gardeners or they might have never picked up a spade in their lives, they might be hard workers or lazy, they might be responsible or a liability... this list could go on. The problem is that until they've worked with a head gardener and a gardening team who can assess their skills and weaknesses properly they really should be monitored/supervised, tying down gardeners who should be gardening! I have over the years met some absolutely incredible volunteers, people with passion, skill and expertise who are a real asset to a garden, but I've also heard enough horror stories to know that some cause real headaches. I've heard blazing rows between volunteers who want to do a particular job and head gardeners who have other ideas, I've seen volunteers do bad jobs of things because they've lacked proper guidance and support, and several years ago I was even told by a volunteer at one National Trust property that the gardening staff there were all idiots and that if they had any sense they'd strip the herbaceous borders and turn them to bedding because that's what 'proper' gardeners do (I let him finish before I told him that the head gardener at that property was a good friend of mine)! These people cause grief while others become real assets to a garden and those employed to look after it, but when someone volunteers at a garden it's a real lucky dip as to what that person will be like, and all to often getting rid of 'bad' volunteers can prove difficult.

Volunteers can work in some great gardens!

So should people be allowed and encouraged to volunteer in gardens? Yes, of course. So many volunteers build up a personal bond with a garden and put so much of themselves into it, and so many volunteers bring skills, ideas and work ethics that make them very much a part of the gardening team. The problems come when organisations use the goodwill of volunteers to avoid having to find money to employ gardeners, putting additional pressure on gardening teams and causing disharmony with gardeners who may face losing their jobs. A balance must be struck, because at the end of the day it is the garden that will suffer most.