Green Fingers And A Business Head

The new RHS president on his own garden and what he will bring to the role

- Tiffany Daneff

It's a broiling day in mid-August when even the ducks on the pond look hot. Keith Weed, the newly appointed president of the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS), is out in the garden that surrounds his 15thcentury timber-frame farmhouse in Surrey. ‘You’ll find him in the border,’ says his wife, Kate, an artist, who is accompanied by two border terriers, Biscuit and Bear, named—Mr Weed tells me later—by their children, two sons and a daughter, all of whom are now grown up.

Sure enough, we discover the president crouched inside the suitably impressive herbaceous border between the cosmos and the crocosmia, obligingly clutching a vast bunch of freshly picked flowers for the COUNTRY LIFE photographer.

He certainly has the right garden for the job and, photograph taken, is touchingly enthusiastic to show off its various parts: the abstract topiary garden, the walled garden with espaliered fruits that he has trained himself, the raised vegetable beds with curled kale and onions and a large herb bed with lovage— ‘people never guess what the leaves are when I put them in a salad’—not to mention the two beds that Kate has filched in order to grow dahlias. (She has 250 tubers, he reports.)

They are both keen growers, but they also employ a gardener— ‘essential when I was working full time’. In the greenhouse, the beefsteak and cherry tomatoes are ripe for the picking. The grapes hanging from the vines above Mr Weed’s head, usually harvested for wine, are suffering a bad bout of mildew after the heat. ‘I was going to cut them all off before you came!’ he jokes.