The team led by Whitehead includes seven gardeners and 20 volunteers.
During the open season, at least one gardener is on site and volunteers work all around the year.
Whitehead says: “The weather is clearly two weeks ahead so we’re constantly writing up plans and then changing them.
“People often ask ‘what do you do in the winter?’, but there’s so much maintenance to be done.
“You have four to six weeks where you can do changes, make new beds, put new paths in, create new features – it is probably the busiest six weeks of the gardening calendar.”
Whitehead says they are trying to make the gardens “sustainable” including a conscious effort to reduce the use of chemicals, which he says is “difficult”.
“We’re not completely organic, but we don’t use any organic insecticides or fungicides,” he says.
“We do use some herbicides, because we have miles and miles of paths, but invariably we don’t use a lot of weed killer. We’re aiming to get away from that if we can at some point.”
He also says that when leaves fall during autumn, rather than collecting them and blowing them off the borders, where possible, they leave them and allow nature to take its course.
“It’s all about making better informed decisions so that instead of us dominating nature we’re trying to get on a bit more of a balance really,” he says.
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