The Royal Horticultural Society is like the Church of England. It seems always to have been there, a fixed, reassuring point in a changing world. Even to those who do not belong to it, it seems a Good Thing and it is hard to imagine national life without it. Among those who know it, it inspires affection and exasperation in about equal measure and, like the C of E, it is troubled.
In early September, the director-general of the RHS, Inga Grimsey, suddenly resigned and will leave next January. The resulting media attention alerted the world to the fact that the directorate was halfway through a ‘restructure’, cutting 10 per cent of salary costs, a loss equivalent to 80 full-time posts. This cut (following an earlier pay freeze) was intended to restore the recession-hit annual operating surplus of £3.3 million.
At the same time, the media got a whiff of how worried gardeners and other employees were about losing their jobs, or of having their roles redefined and untenably expanded, and how they resented the way the directorate was going about the process.
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