Changing careers
Finding home in horticulture, by Ros Ball
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the most popular Radicle post to date has been the one on gardeners’ pay. It has had the highest number of views, shares and generated the most feedback and interaction. Of course money is close to everyone’s heart being something we all need to survive in this world, but also because gardeners are too often overworked, undervalued and underpaid - even if it is a job that brings a lot of joy and satisfaction (or perhaps because of it?). The article brought an outpouring of thoughts and feelings. One person that got in touch in the wake of it was Ros. She was in the process of considering a career change into horticulture. A move she wanted to make for her mental health but a choice made difficult by the pitiful pay. Here she generously shares with us her experience and thoughts. It’s a little longer than usual posts here on Radicle, so you might like to grab a cuppa to settle down and enjoy it with…
Finding home in horticulture, by Ros Ball
Life is short. Life is short. ‘Life is short’ my dear friend Vanessa texts me when I tell her I want to be a professional gardener, but I don’t know if I should. She’s two thirds of the way through a series of chemotherapy, and she has the kind of perspective that is devastatingly clear. I’m on a train to Scotland, watching the coast of Northumberland drop in and out of view. I love the way the sea suddenly opens out in front of us from the picture window of the carriage on the East Coast train. It’s late May and the gorse on the cliffs is mustard yellow, the sky is hazy blue. I’ve seen it a million times and it never gets tired, but I do. I’m struck by the thought that I don’t want to die because there’s still so much I want to grow. That is the TL;DR way of describing my depressed state of mind. I can assure you I’m not suicidal, though there have been times in my life when depression has made me want to stop living, but today I’m simply assessing what the rest of my working life should look like if I want to be happier - what should I do that means I enjoy my career, rather than endure it.
My GP has signed me off work with stress and depression. I am ‘not fit for work’. The work I am not fit for is based in front of a laptop in the public sector and is poorly resourced and runs on the fumes of staff’s sense of duty and goodwill. This is the third time in my career I’ve realised I cannot cope at work and have cracked open like an egg tapped on the side of a bowl. This is the first time I will take more than a few days to attempt to recover before I go back. This time I don’t want to go back.
When I knew I was going to have weeks of free time to recover I panicked. Though I can enjoy my own company I struggled badly when I spent a lot of time at home when my children were small. I slipped through the NHS net, I was never diagnosed with post-natal depression or what I now suspect is the inattentive type of ADHD, and my mental health has never recovered, leaving me on medication as a long-term prop without an end in sight.
The first couple of days away from work I spend at home alone and do nothing except watch TV because I am exhausted. TV stops my mind from running in miserable circles which only signpost the way to downward spirals. I don’t even feel like going to my favourite place, my garden. My GP tells me, “it’s important that you go out and do things,” so after a few days of rest I ask myself what I can do to make use of this time. My mind says go to gardens and ‘work’ and talk. I put a message out on my gardening Instagram page, “Do you work in a garden? Can I come and visit…?” It was women who came to my aid.
While I am ‘unfit’ for my current job I know I am still able to do one kind of ‘work’: gardening. When I garden I regularly think of a documentary I watched many years ago that described the life of an indigenous community in South America who have no word in their language that translates as ‘work’. Their day to day activities are simply how they live, it’s not a ‘job’. Working on land feels that way to me, it’s my refuge, it’s where hours can pass in minutes and my mind becomes quiet as I slip into a state of flow. But don’t get me wrong, I live in a world where I need to get paid, and I’ve never relied on it for my income, my ‘work’. My world is very much based in a culture of mortgages, cost of living panics and financial responsibilities. The idea of leaving my current job for professional gardening is daunting. I have spent the last six months slowly making connections with people in the horticulture industry as I get more obsessed with my hobby and whether I can make it my job. I’ve connected with many younger people and their pay is low and the prospects for better are slim. Others who are a little older have told me they work in the better paying sections of the industry to make it a feasible livelihood, like garden design, landscaping and management. But they too would prefer to do the physical act of gardening, the same thing that I want so badly to be my work. So I know I am contemplating returning to a minimum wage that I last experienced as a student. Is it a price worth paying?
My first trip out the house after being signed off work is to Bell House, a community garden in south London. I have volunteered here a few times and today, as usual there is mostly weeding to do and I am deeply grateful to do it. I like weeds, I don’t ever want to wage war on them but I’m also comfortable removing them from places where they’re not needed and leaving them in spots where they help bring biodiversity to our gardens. I meet another volunteer, quite a bit younger than me who hasn’t been to work since May because of her mental health. We smile broadly at each other when we realise what we have in common, that we are both ‘unfit for work’. I use a small pronged tool to prise creeping cinquefoil out of the edge of a metal border for what feels like around 15 minutes. When I look at my watch I’ve been working for 75 minutes and I am genuinely confused about how time can have gone so fast. When it’s time to pack up I don’t really want to go, but I have latchkey kids at home and dinner to make.
Until recently I have been the main earner in my household for quite a few years, I have a partner and two kids. The idea of being a middle class woman career-changer who relies on her partner’s income to supplement her job is anathema to me. I squirm at the idea. Then I chastise myself for hating on women who have probably raised families and fulfilled their unpaid domestic labour roles with thankless dedication and want their own slice of outdoor life, like me. Instead I get angry online about the fact that gardening is valued and remunerated so poorly - because I’m taking it personally. It makes my decision hard. A friend sends me a job advert which is in my line of work, ‘Director of Learning and Public Engagement’ at the Royal Horticultural Society, which pays £110,000. A quick Instagram poll of people in the industry tells me that even one of the most prized gardens in England, Sissinghurst, only pays their head gardener around £50,000. Can a management job in horticulture be worth more than twice as much as the most senior gardener who provides the foundations, the very bones of what this industry is?
One of the people who hears my call on Instagram is Jade. We started chatting when I posted about gardening pay and found we also shared something else in common, she messages me: ‘Horticulture is so inaccessible. If it wasn’t for my credit cards I couldn’t have left my career to be a gardener, but my job was making me unwell.” She invites me to visit her farm while I am still working and I put it on my list of things I’d like to do, but as my working situation continues to deteriorate I get back in touch. Unlike a core group of people I chat with regularly on Instagram and feel I know quite well, we are relative strangers. My partner jokes with the kids at dinner that they shouldn’t follow my example of meeting up with strangers from the internet. He’s right, I’ve done it many times and I trust my own judgement, but I am essentially going to a field in the middle of nowhere with someone I don’t really know. Luckily my judgement is sound and the visit is probably a life changing moment.
Jade runs Hook Heath Flower Farm and is head gardener at a large private garden. In 2021 she left her career in the NHS as an occupational therapist in forensic mental health and two weeks later set up to work as a gardener. She writes on her website, “The garden came back into my life when I needed it most.” When I visit her she gives me a tour and I immediately offer to do whatever needs doing alongside her. This is not just politeness on my part, I want to be ‘doing’. She tells me about her life and I reciprocate. She has been where I am now and she has very successfully pulled herself out of a nosedive where stress and depression were leading her. We plant out some hellebores, pull up some spent annuals in the polytunnel and pull up black plastic weed suppressant which we both hate, but was there when she bought the business. We agree that when you can see the land, not the plastic, it's much more pleasant to be around, and we are both looking for workplaces that make us feel as good as possible. I bring a badly homemade rhubarb cake to share as a thank you and we laugh about my baking skills. Jade sends me home with a delicate bunch of lilac irises, and I am really touched by this gesture. When I get home I notice that I am happy. Not just in a good mood but my brain feels different. I log the feeling carefully in my mind. I like it, I need more of it.
Back in my every-day world I talk things through with a psychologist (who I grudgingly pay to see because the NHS will simply put me on a distant waiting list). The talk is rational, practical and largely frustrating for me. If I get an ADHD diagnosis, if I get adjustments at work, if I get extra resource at work (I am trying to do two people’s jobs in a three day week), then maybe I could do my job. If, if, if. I talk to my manager with the intention of saying I want to leave immediately but she very sensibly tells me, don’t rush into a decision, it’s hard to know if you are making the right one when you’re unwell. I know this is sensible but it’s not what I want any more.
Until Vanessa’s simple text, no one has told me what I want to hear, that I should stop doing the jobs that always lead me to break down. They do it because they know, just as I do, that I have at times been happy and successful in my career that spanned years doing interesting things at the BBC and then the civil service. I was good at TV presenting, I am brilliant at networking, I’ve written books! I look so successful on paper. I have been happy at times, without a doubt, but if I experience too much pressure, particularly around organisation and logistics, which is bound to be part of this work, then I will be fizzing with cortisol and wondering why I can’t function again.
On Thursdays I study Level 2 horticulture at a community Garden in Zone 2 of London. A wonderful charity which offers horticultural training and particularly prioritises educating low income and unemployed people. I love being in this little urban garden, stuffed to the gills with plants, people, birds, ponds and surrounded by buildings on every side. I love the people I study with because we all share a passion for plants and growing, but within the city, a very specific context. It feels like a gift to have won a place on this course, I had been on the waiting list for some time. In my second term we are a large group of women and one man. On this week my friend Cherrelle asks me how I’m doing and I tell her not so good. “Can I give you a hug?” she asks. I am touched. It feels like exactly the question I needed, it’s a request, an offering, not a demand. It’s a small gesture but feels wide and generous to me. In the following weeks when other classmates are struggling with personal issues I revisit the same question with them and pass on the support that I received. We don’t know each other outside of this haven of a garden, life is not the same outside these fences, but we have an understanding. While we are all there for our love of plants, when the group is asked by the garden’s CEO what we’re going to do once we finish the course - what careers we will pursue - the group is surprisingly quiet. No one is jumping to answer, and I think that speaks volumes. It is hard for this diverse group of people to see where they fit into the industry and how they might do it in a live-able way, to earn enough for this expensive and exhausting city, let alone to thrive while doing it. What would that industry look like? Very different from the present one.
Like other creative industries, such as museums and galleries, horticulture relies on the free and cheap labour of women, whether through volunteering or career changers who live in a house with a second income. Consequently these industries are hard for more diverse groups to access for their careers. One contact tells me that when she started out she earned much less per hour on a private estate as a gardener than the men who turn up periodically to blow leaves and cut the lawn. The reason for this seems to be the same old story, that work done by men remains more highly valued. Of course many men are also professional gardeners or work in the horticulture industry more generally but the value still placed on them by the industry remains clear – just look at who routinely gets to exhibit and wins medals on the avenue at Chelsea, the industry’s shop window. A landscape garden designer tells me she worked at Chelsea this year and was one of the only women around in the landscaping week – as Alice Vincent recently highlighted in Gardens Illustrated, that’s the week where people (read: men) get paid for their labour, while the following planting week is for ‘volunteers’ (read: women). These barriers are a huge frustration, but increasingly they are not going to stop me working in horticulture. They certainly will stop others and leaders of the industry need to reflect heavily on this. It is not ok.
Jade invites me to try out working at the garden where she is head gardener. She is currently the only gardener when previously there were three, so she really needs an extra pair of hands. I am sceptical that this is right for me, it is a long drive across a busy part of London and I am politically stubborn and don’t want to prioritise working in a private garden. The garden itself changes my mind. It is delicious. It has been lovingly planted and is mature but fresh, with so many things I love. Dramatic magenta oriental poppies with dwarf mountain pine, rusty red irises and bee-buzzing nepeta, endless expertly pruned roses heaving with blooms. A peacock has arrived and no one knows where he’s from, Jade feeds him popcorn and sandwich crusts. He seems to have made his home here now. Maybe I will too.
After two days of watering, weeding, chatting, dead-heading, resting and focussing, I am reformed. I go home with chemicals rushing round my brain that I have only felt rarely in recent years. I recognise the feeling from a course I took on meditation some years ago but failed to continue to practice. It’s clearly the same feeling I get after swimming in cold water, which I’ve been doing at a lake in Beckenham for the past year to try to reduce my stress. There’s a pleasant gumminess in the brain, equivalent to sinking your teeth into a marshmallow, at once clear but also soft, and thinking is relaxed and removed from the usual internal mind loops. I text Jade about how happy I am. She writes back, “Something so special about the garden, it heals anyone that enters”.
When I said I didn’t want to die because there’s so much I want to grow, I really mean it. Since the pandemic I’ve become so caught up in growing that I see the years ahead not as blocks of 365 days but as the number of summers I might still have in my life - 35 maybe, or 40 if I’m lucky. That doesn’t seem all that many when you’ve had the experience of a wildly successful year growing tomatoes that you’ve yet to repeat, or that your small budget means patiently growing from seed taking years to fill out a border. Another passion also seems to be returning, before this week I thought I didn’t want to write any more. I have a book coming out in September about women in politics. I enjoyed researching it and I am passionate about the subject matter but I have felt strangely removed from the idea of writing since I finished it. On the train to Scotland I am struck by a real need to write down the details of what has been happening to me, how I feel, what I want to say about the inequalities of this industry I want to move into. I only have my phone and I tap it into my notes for several hours. I am in a similar state of flow to gardening. No one has asked me to write this, I have no deadline, I have no reason to write this down other than that I want to, and it feels like a river running out of me, quite unstoppable. Everything is easing.
I send the notes to my laptop after a few weeks, during a spell of stunning hot days with the kind of cloudless skies that I don’t consider very typical of this island and remind me of the climate crisis . Two and a half hours later I haven’t had breakfast and I’ve written 3,000 words. What’s happening to me? It reminds me a little of the first lockdown in the pandemic. It was a terrible time for so many, but I secretly relished the stopping of my busy life as I knew it. The demands on me shrank to a number I felt was manageable. I felt freer and less burdened. I had also turned to my garden at this time, it’s when I really became obsessed. Here I am again looking for a way to stop, to step away from the grind, and the things that seem impossible to leave behind, until you do.
I’m not going back to my office job for now. I have a career break form waiting for me to fill in once I’ve finished writing this. I will send it because it gives me a safety net if the horticulture industry doesn’t fill the gap my family still needs for our household finances. As much as I want to throw myself in I need to keep some of that rationality that my psychologist and line-manager prescribed to protect myself and those who depend on me. This week, instead of managing stakeholders (I will be so pleased never to call anyone a stakeholder ever again) and answering countless emails, I spent several mindful hours tying in and shaping a series of 6 honeysuckle arches. I did it with my 20 years of gardening experience, with my level 2 horticulture training and with my creative mind (the one that has been so financially valuable in other work settings). Full disclosure, which may be useful for others here - I have negotiated a pay rate of £20 an hour, but as I am self-employed this is not really my hourly wage. I have to pay for fuel, insurance, sick pay, holiday pay, pension and more. It is little better than minimum wage for London. But I will do it for now, because I can and because it’s healing me. Others won’t be so lucky, and I’d like many more people to be able to follow my path. Life can be horribly short and definitely too short to spend a majority of our waking hours working in jobs that make us ill, but until those of us who work on the land are recognised as valuable and skilled it will continue to be an option that is difficult for many people to choose.
Ros Ball is an author, journalist, policy advisor and now a self-employed gardener. In 2017 she published her first book, The Gender Agenda. Her second book, Women Who Won is out in September. Ros lives in South London with her family. You can find Ros on Instagram @ros_but_growing
Ros is being paid for this article.
Photo credit: Ros Ball
Brilliant and beautiful!