Down To Earth

The RHS president on his hopes for the horticultural industry

IT’S a shame that the meeting with Sir Nicholas Bacon (or Nico, as everyone in the office prefers) has to be held in the Vincent Square headquarters of the RHS rather than at his home at Raveningham, Norfolk, where he gardens every weekend he can. However, he’s just as relaxed here as he hurries down the corridor to ‘the DG’s office’, which is meant to be quieter, although the shouts from the cricket pitch below almost drown out the birdsong in the upper branches of the London plane trees.

Sir Nicholas is the 19th RHS president since its foundation in 1804 and he comes with a barrowload of expertise, not to mention titles, but it’s soon apparent that it’s not being Lord Warden of the Stannaries in Cornwall, Master Forester of Dartmoor, the Premier Baronet of England or even president of the Norfolk Beekeepers Assocation (although he is a devoted apiarist) that makes him so perfect for the role.

‘It wasn’t a question of liking or hating horticulture, it was just a question of having to do it,’ he says. Lady Priscilla Bacon, his mother, was a well-known gardener, who made the garden at Raveningham and its collections of snowdrops and agapanthus, bringing back bulbs of the latter from South Africa in the 1950s and 1960s before anyone in Britain knew much about them. She also opened a nursery hoping that selling plants might pay for the garden (it didn’t).

In time-honoured fashion, a packet of radish seeds was handed to the five-year-old Nico with instructions to sow them. ‘When they grew, I was told to go and thin them and, when they needed to be picked, I was told to go and put an elastic band around 10 and put them in the box to go to market.’