The Times - UK (2020-07-31)

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the times | Friday July 31 2020 2GM 3


News


For the new president of the Royal


Horticultural Society, the appointment


was fate. Or at least nominative


determinism.


Keith Weed’s position at the helm,


which is being announced today, ap-


pears almost to have been predeter-


mined by his father’s surname and


mother’s maiden name. “My dad was a


Weed but my mother was a Hedges,” he


told The Times. “If a Weed gets together


with a Hedges, I think they’re going to


give birth to the president of the RHS.”


Mr Weed’s gravitation towards a


career reflected in his name is some-


thing familiar to many at the society.


Two years ago the organisation discov-


ered that one in eight of its staff had a


name associated with nature, the out-


doors or horticulture, such as Heather,


Berry, Moss, Gardiner or Shears, and


various permutations of Rose.


Mr Weed, 59, who said he was “sure I


will get teased more being the president


of the RHS called Weed than I ever was


at school”, succeeds Sir Nicholas Bacon,


67, as president at an unprecedented


time in the charity’s 216-year history.


He takes up the position after the


RHS cancelled the Chelsea Flower


Show, the highlight of the horticultural


calendar, for the first time since the


Second World War due to coronavirus.


The organisation also scrapped a


clutch of other shows, closed its gar-


dens and expects losses of up to £18 mil-


lion this year. Shows at Cardiff and


Chatsworth are off next year.


Nevertheless, he said, the pandemic


had in some ways created a golden


opportunity for the environment and


for sustainability in general.


Britons frustrated under the lock-


down flocked to gardens if they had


them or began growing vegetables and


herbs in windowsill boxes. About 15


million people visited the RHS website


in the first 100 days of the lockdown,


compared with 20 million last year.


“I think society’s under a lot of pres-


sure ,” Mr Weed said. “Right now, we are


in the middle of Covid. This has coin-


cided with the evolution of the climate


crisis, which has become more and


more profound. There are issues


around water and drought, and the


whole area of sustainability is going to


be a much bigger part of everyday life,


and we’re going to have to change our


lives to address that.


“Yet there was so much enjoyment


from gardening in lockdown, and more


people gardening than ever before. Not


just gardening, but also thinking about


real environmental sustainability. Gar-


dening has had a renaissance over the


past few months. In some ways we’ve
learnt new behaviours under Covid —
washing hands, social distancing,
facemasks. We would hope that one of
the things we can do is be better on be-
haviour that we can do as gardeners
that can have a meaningful impact.
“These are some of the things we can
tap into. We need to mainstream sus-
tainability in our lives. It’s a call for gar-
deners, current and future, to get be-
hind the revolution. It’s a fabulous time
to get involved.”
Mr Weed, a former engineering grad-

uate of the University of Liverpool who
began working at the Michelin tyre
factory before spending 37 years at
Unilever, where he led the Unilever
sustainable living plan, said: “We are
currently burning nature’s library. Now
is the time to act and address the
biodiversity crisis.”
Wild bluebells adorning green spaces
up and down the land are in danger of
dying out, as the downy hemp nettle, a
flowering plant of the sage family, and
lamb’s succory have already done, or
the aptly named ghost orchid may have

done, he said. “The story of
[endangered species] is well known but
all these animals live off the diversity of
plants. We have 29 million gardeners in
the UK. They can be a big part of that
[restoration of] biodiversity.”
Mr Weed lives in the North Downs,
seven miles from RHS Wisley, with his
wife, Kate James-Weed, an artist, and
their dogs.
He said that his intention was to
“make sure the offer for gardening is ac-
cessible to all”. In 2016 Juliet Sargeant’s
anti-slavery garden was the first show

garden by a black female gardener at
Chelsea. It won a gold medal.
Mr Weed said: “Post-lockdown I was
at Hyde Hall [the RHS garden in
Chelmsford, Essex]. They were talking
about diversity they’ve noticed since
reopening, a more diverse group of
people of ethnic backgrounds, and of
age. There’s more people that have
discovered gardening than before and I
want to encourage that.”
He also hopes to encourage
companies to harness gardening as a
form of mental health treatment, for
example “the area where someone is
well enough to start engaging with life
but not well enough to go back to work”.
He said that he wants businesses “to
support and sponsor employees to start
getting back to work by working in
gardens”.
They are tall ambitions for a Weed,
although even weeds have a role, with
his favourite being the plants in his
wildflower meadow that would not
be very welcome in his garden. “A weed
is just a plant in the wrong place,” he
said.
Garden offices, Bricks & Mortar

A letter from “the greatest fossilist the


world ever knew” to a pioneering


palaeontologist is expected to make


£8,000 to £12,000 when it is offered for


sale online next week.


In the unpublished letter dated Feb-


ruary 15, 1829, Mary Anning, of Lyme


Regis, described her latest discoveries


to her friend and collaborator William


Buckland, including the skeleton of a


plesiosaur that is now in the Natural


History Museum in London.


Anning, the daughter of a cabinet-


Fossil hunter’s letter digs up history of museum plesiosaur


Mark Bridge History Correspondent
maker who also found and sold fossils,
searched the cliffs and beaches around
her Dorset home and made important
discoveries, including the first correctly
identified ichthyosaur.
Local lore has it that a lightning strike
that killed a woman holding Anning
when she was a baby gave her extra-
ordinary intelligence and curiosity. She
risked life and limb to collect fossils but,
as a woman of humble origin who sold
the items she found, she was never fully
accepted by the scientific community.
Yet in recent decades her reputation
has grown. Hugh Torrens, a leading


historian of palaeontology, declared
her the world’s greatest fossilist and she
will soon be brought to life by Kate
Winslet in the biopic Ammonite.
Little of Anning’s correspondence
has survived and nothing has come to
auction before. In the three-page letter,
Anning, 29, told Buckland, a professor
of geology and mineralogy at the Uni-
versity of Oxford who had befriended
her, that she had delayed sending him
some specimens because frost had
affected her work on the cliffs. How-
ever, she said that she had now sent him
a box: “... there are few coprolites

which I hope you will think good there
is one with bits of Sepia in it another in
marle [marl] with some remarkable
bones in it one has an impression of an
Ammonite.. .” Anning was first to re-
cognise coprolites as fossilised faeces.
She discussed her “new skeleton”, for
which she said she had been offered
only £30 by an institution in Bristol and
was considering contacting a French
zoologist instead. Sotheby’s says this
was undoubtedly the Plesiosaurus
dolichodeirus she found on January 29,
1829.
Gabriel Heaton, Sotheby’s specialist

in books and manuscripts, said that
Anning would have known that Buck-
land would mention to the British
Museum her threat to sell the remains
to the French. The British Museum ac-
quired the plesiosaur; its natural his-
tory collection later formed the basis of
the Natural History Museum.
Buckland, a theologian and palaeon-
tologist, was known for writing the first
full account of a fossil dinosaur, which
he named “megalosaurus”, in 1824, and
for his interest in eating natural history
— startling guests with dishes such as
mice on toast, hedgehog or crocodile.

Keith Weed, outside his East Horsley home in Surrey, said that interest in gardening had soared during the lockdown. Above: Sue Key, a gardener at RHS Wisley


Born for the job


The theory of nominative
determinism, or people with
appropriate names for their
jobs, was coined by an
article in New Scientist
magazine in 1994 about the
urologists Splatt and
Weedon (Patrick Kidd
writes). In fact, the Times
Diary column had been

playing this game 20 years
earlier. In 1974 the Diary had
noted Inspector Barker,
head of the dogs section of
Merseyside police, and Mrs
Serff, of the department of
medieval history at
University College Dublin.
When the Times Diary
was revived in 2013 we

marked the retirement of
Lord Judge as Lord Chief
Justice and invited readers
to send in more examples.
They included the
Department for Education’s
chief schools adjudicator,
Elizabeth Passmore, and the
former surveyor of the
fabric of Westminster

Abbey, Donald Buttress. Or
Robin Banks of
Bedfordshire police.
Then there was Tugwell, a
midwife; Breakwell, an
orthopaedic surgeon;
Smallbones, a paediatric
nurse; as well as dentists
called Nashar, Fang and
Fillingham.

Weed shoots to top of gardening world


The aptly named new


president of the Royal


Horticultural Society


has big ambitions,


reports Fariha Karim


HELEN YATES/RHS; OLIVER DIXON/REX
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