Senior Gardener
National Trust

Jane T

00:00:01 My name is Jane T. I’m senior gardener at Clumber Park, at Worksop. Day to day, I look after the glass house and the kitchen garden. There’s four acres of kitchen garden, and the glass house is four hundred and fifty foot long, and we produce fruit and vegetables for the use in the restaurant, and also obviously it’s a visitor attraction. We’re open to the public seven days a week from March through to the end of October.

00:00:34 When I was at school, I actually wanted, initially, to be a ship’s stewardess. It’s something I never did because you had to be twenty-three, I discovered, to do that, and when you’re only about sixteen twenty-three seems like really old. And it was pretty common to do things when I was at school like be a hairdresser, or be a nurse or something like that, and I didn’t really want to do anything conventional so I joined the police force.

00:01:07 My mother was a nurse, so I think she was quite keen that I should be a nurse, but I really didn’t want to do that, and by the time I think we had careers advice at school, I think I’d already decided that I wanted to join the police force and they seemed to be very keen on trying to talk me out of it.

00:01:26 I joined the cadets first of all, as soon as I’d left school, but when I was old enough to join the regular force I was posted back to my own town in Retford, and I think that was quite a good move really because I know a lot of policewomen in those days that are perhaps posted to bigger cities would just deal with shoplifters and things like that all day long, whereas I managed to get quite a lot of variety really. So whatever came up, and it might be just normal traffic offences, or people missing from home, sudden deaths, or… so it was quite varied really.

00:02:07 I did that for about four years, and then got married to a policeman and left shortly afterwards. Eventually, as the children grew up, I started working in a building society, part-time at first, and I ended up there for sixteen years and finished up as a mortgage underwriter.

00:02:28 Well, the turning point was definitely when I was ill. I had cancer eleven years ago and I think I decided there and then that I would have to change my lifestyle. It was some time before I actually did that because obviously there was quite a long period of treatment to undergo, so I then started looking at different options but always came back to gardening because that was the thing that I enjoyed most.

00:03:01 The love of gardening came from my granddad. He was a very keen gardener and had a large garden. I used to go and stay with him every school holiday and always used to help him in the garden. I think it developed from there. So, obviously, when I got my own garden then that became really my chief hobby, I think.

00:03:25 I think in five year’s time I’d probably see myself still being here and still doing this. I would hope so, anyway. We’ve got lots of exciting projects underway at the moment and it would be very nice just to see how they progress. Obviously, every garden takes time to mature, and we’re planting up some new borders this winter so it will be very, very nice to see how they progress in the future.

00:03:55 End