Interview: Lord Thurso

CB - There is no doubt that gardening in Caithness leaves little room for error – does nature pull you back into line?

We get these huge gales. We had a mammoth gale in the first week in September - 70-80 mph wind which is laden with salt. The day before I had gone out to the veg patch and it all looked very pretty and I had tied some runner beans and  made some wigwams and I was thinking oh that’s good we are going to have beans here. The next day they had all been smashed to the ground because the wind had come over the wall.  It hits the wall at the front of the garden, bounces up over the house and bounces down on the veg patch and goes back out.

CB -That’s why on exposed sites you very often find that a head gardener would impose a hedge rather than a wall because the hedge slows the wind down rather than stopping it. You get a 70% increase in the speed of the wind as it accelerates over a wall whereas you get a huge reduction if you allow the wind to come through the perforations of a hedge.

CB - So are you a cook as well as a gardener? Very often you find keen gardeners also mature into chefs?

My life was in catering and the hotel industry.  As part of my training at the Savoy, I spent a year in the kitchens at The Berkeley Hotel and therefore I have a lot of the basic skills.  I am not a good cook at all, in the sense of producing gourmet food, but I will happily produce lots of very honest, ordinary things. I will make up sauces as I go along because once you know the basic techniques and how you thicken and all the rest of it, you can muck about and sometimes they come out all right - and sometimes they don’t!

CB - One of the driving forces for many people especially recently is the fact that we can grow organically. Where do you stand on the organic discussion?

I am certainly not a hard and fast organic gardener. I am largely because we have some old stables I let to some ladies with horses and they have a lot of horse manure which rots down, so I can go and get a wheel barrow full of pretty good stuff whenever I want.  I don’t use a lot of pesticides - although occasionally if I come out and my beautiful cabbage has gone from a work of art into a colander –I do declare war. But more often than not I pick ‘em off and flick them away. My problem is that I am down in London for 4 days a week, so I can’t just pop out every evening to check on them.  So sometimes if there is a bad infestation I deal with it chemically.  But again – it’s everything in moderation.

I suppose our costal position is both a disadvantage and a huge advantage, as many of the pests simply can’t tolerate the extreme of conditions.  

CB: Cabbage Whites, of course, are one of the few that are used to costal conditions – they look for a patch of green in shingle that’s how they pinpoint the cabbage, so I under sow with anything that’s green - it could be parsley, chives anything - even used astro turf - it actually camouflages the cabbage as they think it’s all lawn and they fly off.  

CB - Do you feel a sense of responsibility for the gardens and the landscapes that you have inherited?

I have an acute sense of responsibility. I suppose being the eldest son I knew the estate was coming to me from a very early age. I didn’t think about it but I just knew that is my duty. I do worry hugely about climate change as I can see the change in weather patterns and I can see the damage that man has done and would like to persuade people to be more responsible.  I suppose I regard myself as a link in a chain that my son will one day be responsible for and that I can hand it over to him in good heart and perhaps enthuse him to look at it in the same way.

CB - Did you feel that the inheritance limited your other career as you knew you had this large patch of land to manage?

When I was making my career choices aged 18 I didn’t think about mortality, you don’t think about your father not being there. My parents were wonderful and very encouraging and I was very rebellious! I kind of knew that I didn’t want to do the traditional things.  Almost by accident I ended up going to the Savoy and becoming a management trainee and I became very enthusiastic and reasonably proficient at it.  I was also incredibly lucky and I got appointed to be general manager of a hotel in Paris which was owned by the Savoy, when I was only 26.  I then set about teaching myself how to be a manager. I had a wonderful self educational journey, then came back to the UK to set up Cliveden which was a wonderful thing to do.

And then of course this spurious accident of birth, when my father died, I became a Lord and suddenly I had a platform to talk about things and again it was a very interesting life.

Becoming a politician was another accident as I really had no intention of ever doing it but when hereditary Lords were chucked out of the House of Lords, my predecessor from Caithness thought I should have a go at running as MP and it was one of those things that I had never thought of doing. But once someone had suggested it, I thought that it was not a bad idea.

I am very conscious that in my lifetime the whole world has changed beyond recognition. I have tried not to impose the same sense of responsibility and burden of the Estate on my son and have given him a real choice.  But thankfully he appears to be deeply in love with home, which is nice and he enjoys the hills.

CB - To what extent do you think gardening or gardens should be pushed forwards as a major draw for tourists?

I think that they are a stunning draw. My experience at Cliveden is that it was both a stunning attribute to have the wonderful National Trust garden all around us and undoubtedly helped the product of the hotel.  The vast bulk of visitors who came to the estate and the garden, when it was open to the public were members of the National Trust and there is no doubt that visiting gardens is a major hook for any destination.

I am a Trustee of The Queen Elizabeth Castle of Mey Trust.  When Queen Elizabeth was alive the garden was aimed entirely to perform in August as she would come up in the first week in August and stay for 3 weeks.  She would then leave and returned for a week in September.  So when we opened to the public and built a visitors centre, the gardens really had to be redesigned due to the lack of interest in May and June which are wonderful times in the garden.     So we worked with the lovely head gardener for  several years to create a garden which reflected what Queen Elizabeth liked and loved but gave all year round interest.  The results are tremendous and we now call ourselves the Castle and Gardens of Mey.  And people come back to see what we are doing to the gardens because a garden is something you can return to again and again.