We finally wore him out. No more hedge cutting.
It’s terrifying. It’s not as if he just did hedge cutting – and there’s a hell of a lot of that – but he was always willing to turn his hand, and brain, arms and legs, to anything else we asked of him. He helped with our building projects as you can see above, he did strimming, planting, pruning, painting, gravelling the paths, mulching, cutting down delinquent shrubs and trees, mending conservatory roof lights, and removing diseased box when we were too upset to contemplate it.
He has a good eye and an intelligent and problem solving approach to everything he did. He worked fast and hard in the cold and the rain and I think he’s paid the price for it. I do hope he’ll recover and we can’t help hoping that he may be able to come back and help out again, even if not with hedge cutting.
Here he is, about to cut a gigantic holly.
And here, building….
How will we manage to replace him? Charles has been doing his level best to keep the garden good, almost like an addiction, and he’s getting battered by it too and he can’t face the major hedges which Jeff was known for, county wide. Kept up all on one day a week.
How can we possibly replace Jeff?
One problem is that it’s a puzzle. People who advertise hedge cutting also seem to be tree surgeons and landscapers, and we don’t need those things much, just a lot of other things. We’re getting older (that must surprise you) too, so more than ever we need someone we can turn to for heavy work.
Are we looking for a ‘gardener’? Perhaps, but we’re not looking for skilled pruning, grafting and RHS qualifications, which may make it hard for someone to adopt our rather unusual approach to gardening.
This is scary in many ways!
I believe we need too many things to find in one person. See the list of things Jeff has done for us. Do we need a company? What sort? Or another mad dedicated individual? Or a gardener and a hedge cutter as well?
And will anyone anywhere be willing to take any part of this on!???
Help!
And no more Billy!
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You’re going to need Charles to show you which end of your tools is the handle and which end gets things done. You’re never too old to learn something new! 🥴
Thought you’d want the job!
I so understand. It is nice to know that I am not alone in my struggles to find someone, anyone who is willing to do those hard jobs.
I do hope we can, it will be the end of the garden if we can’t. Hope you do too!
I sincerely hope that you are able to find someone to replace Jeff.
Thanks, Yvonne. Xxxx
Oh Anne! So sorry for you! – MW
Thanks Marianne.
I hope you are able to find someone to help you. The ladder thing really scares me. Please wear a hard hat. At least there is the possibility you will find someone which would be impossible where I live. I am finally coming to realize that nearing 80 I cannot do this anymore, even with my husband’s invaluable help with the big stuff. When I set forth designing this garden I created a bit of a monster. A monster that everyone enjoys visiting but……Good luck.
Yes, we certainly have a monster too. I will remind Charles re hard hat next time he’s up a ladder, but fat chance he’ll take any notice! I hope you find some help too. Xx
Look at it from the other end of the hedge cutter. Are garden services becoming increasing specialised? I’m getting older so I need more help with the team I have. A team qualified by experience, and paper, and simply turning up. If a colleague moves on, who do I turn to, to add to the team? I need someone who knows their Hairy Bittercress from their Horny Goat Weed, can stand on a ladder all day and cut a straight line, a curve, an angle. Prune for flower, fruit or form, barrow muck around all day, and equally doff their cap and sort out the drainage in the lower field. Experienced and willing and personable but someone I can mould into my vision of the perfect team member. Oh well. I don’t know if all these skills are becoming more and more niche areas. I’ve always aimed to get a comprehensive team together but clients are increasingly, anxious almost, that the boundaries between skills are maintained intensely. If you can prune a wisteria you mustn’t be wasted on menial tasks! I want to work as a complete gardener, happily turning a pile of muck, scrub bashing a neglected copse as well as pontificating on designed landscapes.
I’m looking for someone now, and I’m only down the road from you, so write out the perfect job description and I’ll send them your way!
That’s interesting and I find it strange and frustrating that people would want those skills kept discrete when in reality they make up the whole which any good garden needs. I’ll happily write the description – though I think you may just have done that,- and if you find them, I’d happily help teach them.
Hi Anne, I am really sorry that you have lost Jeff the Wizard, this clearly is a very challenging situation, those laser cut hedges clearly speak volumes.
We met many years ago at Derry Watkins’ garden (you half-jokingly invited me to write for your website TG after I said that I “disliked” the majority of gardens but “The Courts” in Holt, Wilts (where I worked 20 years ago with Troy Scott Smith), was my all-time favourite garden. It still is.). “We need more people like you” you said, and of course I am sure you meant “We need more people like me, Anne Wareham”.
Digressing: I trained this great couple, now very good friends, from Verona (not just via my grasses workshop mentioned in TG article, but through a longer course in 2004). You may remember them: https://thinkingardens.co.uk/?s=russo
I am sorry for Jeff’s health, first of all, and, yes, for you too, because he definitely seems irreplaceable. I liked Gareth’s comment and also your reply to him (key phrase: they make up the whole which any good garden needs).
I hope Jeff will recover from “Veddw burnout” and will come back. I really do. Your garden is large and complex and only a magician can keep it as it is with just one day a week. Incredible.
I love your garden, never been there but for me a garden without edges is not a garden, it is not a human creation. Sort of. Well, I mean it actually. Maybe because I am Italian. With all these New Waves and third waves, we forget (I don’t and you don’t either, Anne!) that a huge proportion of the most beautiful and famous gardens in the world (those which made the history of garden design) are formal and have hedges. We, gardeners, need an injection of formality, a double jab, ideally, and if not enough, a booster. And many skilled Jeffs.
Did I digress? Back to Jeff: whoever was or is able to perform all those tasks with such dexterity, energy and dedication should be very well paid, minimum 25£/hour.
I am a colleague (I weed, dig, prune, design and pontificate for audiences too) and I know what a true luxury having somebody like him in your garden was, at all levels.
It makes me smile when on Hortic Week or in The Garden they say there is a lack of good gardeners. There is a lack of proper (financial) recognition of our skills. This is the ONLY reason why competent gardeners are rare: they are underpaid.
I hope he will be back and I personally hope to find the time to drive to Wales and to Veddw sometimes and meet you again. I live in Kent, 9 minutes from Vita’s garden, so, you are slightly distant.
Again, good luck to you, Charles and to Jeff.
We (and the hedges) are missing Jeff badly. That degree of hedge cutting could just be a bit like sport and athletics: a young person’s game? He hasn’t given up physically demanding work, but his neck and shoulders are damaged and it would make no sense for him to risk them again if they recover.
I think you mean a garden without ‘hedges’ not ‘edges’? We – Charles and I – never forget the Italian classic gardens. I think Charles loves them above all. Apart from Veddw, natch.
I love the idea of paying gardeners well, perhaps much more than you suggest in an ideal world. And I think perhaps it ought to go alongside paying very good money to see the gardens? But it’s just not the world we live in in the uk, where gardens are assumed to arise spontaneously out of the earth, pay for themselves and open for charities.
I do hope you’ll make it from Kent to Wales one day. Let us know you are coming and stay to have tea with us? You could call in at Derry’s again too, that’s always a treat.
Thanks for writing, good to hear from you. Xxxxx
Hi Anne, thanks for the kind invitation, I really hope to make it. Yes indeed, I meant hedges. And I agree, a beautiful garden should be recognised for what it is, a work of art and the cost of the entrance tickets should reflect this. Regards, Daniele
Very sorry to hear about Jeff’s injuries. Hope he has recovered by now.
Hope you have managed to find someone to help you with the hedges.
Thank you. Jeff’s gone off to damage different parts of himself, landscaping. We miss him. But we have found someone else willing to destroy themselves, for which we are enormously grateful. The whole thing looked very fragile for a while!