The day after I interview Andy Jasper – at Gertrude Jekyll’s former house and garden at Munstead Wood in Surrey – about his plans as director of gardens and parklands at the National Trust, I receive an email announcing his resignation. Was it something I said?
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A few hours later, Andy pings across an apologetic text, explaining that he had to stay silent until everything had been signed off with his new job. So we schedule another conversation, about the role which has tempted him away from the National Trust after just three years: CEO of the Eden Project, based in his native Cornwall.
After ten years I went back to Eden and was staggered by the quality of the horticulture. I think that any gardener who visits now will be blown away.
In fact, Andy is not new to Eden, having already done a stint there from 2000 to 2012.
But with his typical puppyish enthusiasm, he states: “This is a huge step up for me. When I left, I was a junior director, having been there since the beginning. My role had morphed from being in charge of research to the beginnings of the Eden International project.”
A lot has indeed changed since 2012. Eight schemes are currently listed as in development by Eden, in addition to the iconic original garden, consisting of giant biomes set in an abandoned tin mine in Cornwall. Some projects are as far afield as China, Dubai and Australia, while others, such as a rainforest restoration scheme in Costa Rica, appear to involve little more than a watching brief and loan of the brand name.
Andy’s focus, as he takes up the CEO role this month, is on one new development which is (slightly) closer to home – at Morecambe, in Lancashire. This is to be a set of four cockleshell biomes sitting right on the seafront, on the site of an old amusement park. “It’s there right in front of you,” says Andy. “An element of showmanship is really important in a seaside town.”
As with the original Eden, the Morecambe project is as much about regeneration as it is about conservation. “We are talking to local businesses and finding out how they can be involved,” he says. “We really believe in using local people and products. I’ve seen at first hand the potential transformation, having lived in Cornwall in the 1980s.”
One of seven children, Andy grew up in St Just, where his father was vicar. The rambling vicarage garden was an early inspiration. “It was almost a designed landscape, with camellias, rhododendrons, lots of unusual hybrids and various random standing stones and crosses.”
Now in his early fifties, Andy’s Cornish identity clearly remains important to him, as does a sense of social responsibility, which is perhaps derived in part from his father’s example.
A relative latecomer to gardens, he spent the first decade of his career working in social services with young offenders and families in Berkshire, before joining the Eden Project in 2000, having completed a degree in heritage management at the University of Exeter.
Andy reacts to the suggestion that Eden, as a visitor attraction, is a long way from the fine horticulture of many National Trust gardens. “After ten years I went back to Eden and was staggered by the quality of the horticulture,” he insists. “I think that any gardener who visits now will be blown away.”
The brilliant thing about head gardeners is that they are fantastic planners.
But he acknowledges that Eden is a different experience to a traditional country-house garden, bracketing it with attractions such as the walled garden at Alnwick, and Wisley, the RHS’s flagship garden, where Andy oversaw the creation of a vast new shop and nursery. He has ambitions to “sharpen up” the horticulture at Eden, and won’t be shy of getting involved with the details of horticultural design. Beneath that genial exterior lies a terrier-like determination to get things done.
As for the National Trust, Andy says he leaves with 117 more gardeners in post than when he arrived, having also increased the number of 18-month apprenticeships from 17 to 40.
In his short time at the Trust, he always maintained that “the gardeners are the stars” and sought to find ways of empowering them – chiefly by means of what he termed a “united alliance” of curator, head gardener and countryside manager at each property. “The brilliant thing about head gardeners is that they are fantastic planners,” he says. “They have to be really organised.”
Andy’s chief legacy at the National Trust is likely to be the various new funding programmes he set up, including a pot of £1.5 million of central unrestricted funds for garden grants of up to £35,000. One outcome of that initiative is mass narcissi plantings at Stourhead that have lit up early spring at the landscape garden.
Andy has instigated another, more ambitious investment programme, named Grow 4, which he hopes will fund significant changes at ten National Trust gardens over the next five years – places such as Lamb House, in Rye, which has high visitor numbers but no notable garden.
Three years is not a long time to have spent in a post such as director of gardens at the National Trust. But on the other hand, it is clear that Andy Jasper was made an offer he simply couldn’t refuse. The Cornishman is going home.
