This week’s article has been prepared by John Shortland, who will be known to many readers due to his long association with Bourne End and the Shortlands department store in The Parade.

People are often surprised when they hear that I switched careers from one of retailing fashions to designing and creating gardens, John Shortland writes, but the two aren’t as different as they at first seem. Both require an understanding of colour and texture as well as the right seasonal weather to be successful!

Shop Days

My family owned Arthur Shortland Limited, a double-fronted shop on the south side of The Parade in Bourne End. It had been started by my great-grandfather around 1900 and it was inevitable, perhaps, that I would also join the business upon leaving school. The store, as many will remember, sold not just men’s and ladies’ fashions and footwear but also children’s clothing and shoes, as well as linens, fabrics, haberdashery and all the other items one might expect to find in a small department store. It ceased trading in 1994.

I left school in 1968 at the age of sixteen and persuaded my parents that I was old enough to cycle around the West Country for a couple of weeks on my own. There were no credit cards or mobile phones in those days and so contact was maintained through postcards. With no consideration for my parent’s concerns, I was able to avoid going home for several months.

The reason behind my reluctance to return was that I had found work on a remote Exmoor hill farm which I now never wanted to leave. One day my parents appeared there to take me home to begin my retail career – they had procured a training place for me at Suters Store in Slough where I progressed through the various departments before joining our business in 1971. I became Managing Director at my father’s early death in 1979. When the shop closed fifteen years later, I was in my early forties, mortgaged and with an uncertain future which looked rather bleak. I toyed with the ideas of several careers, none of which much appealed.

With a hankering for the outdoor life I’d known on Exmoor, (I still visit several times a year), I decided to follow my dream and seek a new career working outdoors although I realised that farming was no longer an option.

Back to School

My horticultural career began with a two-year intensive course at the Berkshire College of Agriculture (BCA), our local agricultural college at Burchett’s Green. Gardening had always been a hobby and now I was going to try and make a living from it. I decided to study Landscape and Estate Management to give me a broader understanding of the sector.

The facilities and training I received there were second to none and helped me to achieve in a very short time a huge and varied experience, including working on a project for BBC Gardener’s World alongside the late and much-loved Geoff Hamilton. With responsibility for growing the plants required I was thrilled when we won a RHS Silver Medal. Later, I assisted designer Dan Pearson on the Channel 4 Television series ‘Garden Doctors’. For two years I also worked behind the scenes at the Chelsea Flower Show which was a great privilege.

Those that have endured the crush on the public days will be envious of my twenty-four-hour pass which meant that I was able to enter and view the display gardens alone once the crowds had gone. However, it was working for several months on the privately-owned Wormsley Estate near Stokenchurch that made me decide to aim at becoming a Head Gardener.

The duties of a Head Gardener are to ensure that there is an all-year succession of flowers, fruit and vegetables for the household, manage the gardening teams and, on occasion, give tours of the gardens to groups and visitors. At Wormsley I learnt the practical, daily routine of running a garden to an exceptionally high standard; I especially loved working in their extensive range of greenhouses where all sorts of exotic plants were grown.

Fortune was with me for I was soon approached for that role by the European Youth Parliament, an educational charity, whose headquarters were at Marlow. I had recently returned from a study tour of Hungary and now I was working closely with people from all over Europe. From there I moved to an innovative estate, owned locally by a charming Swedish family, and asked to create a new lake and an arboretum.

They were happy days where each year in the walled kitchen garden, and purely for fun, we would run trials of various fruit and vegetables just to find the tastiest. I remained there for several years before finally moving away to the Cotswolds (where I still live) to run the historic, Italianate gardens at Kiddington Hall. I had to keep reminding myself that I was being paid for this dream job!

Garden Design and a Publishing Contract

Through contacts at Kiddington I became involved with the County Gardens Trust and began to organise talks and tours for the newly formed Oxfordshire branch. As I became known locally, I began to receive enquiries about helping individuals with their own gardens. They told me they wanted colourful gardens that were easy to maintain and so in 2006 I decided to go freelance.

I purposely kept the business small so that I would retain the hands-on approach – I didn’t want to return to an indoor job in a design studio. I was fortunate in having a small and knowledgeable team of gardeners to help me and the business flourished. Although much of the work was local, on occasion it took me further afield to other parts of the country although, sadly, the project in St Lucia didn’t materialise!

Around this time, I also began to write more seriously, not just about gardening but of other things that interested me. I had always kept notes and photographs of my work and these I expanded into a blog, Life in the English Cotswolds. Thanks to it being mentioned in the Observer Online and in other social media, it now has followers from all corners of the world. I now don’t know how I ever found the time but I began to meet socially with other Oxfordshire writers and we thought it would be fun to try and organise a small event locally. The idea snowballed and in in 2012 we held the first Chipping Norton Literary Festival to great national acclaim.

It was an extraordinary and exciting time as my role meant that I was meeting some of the biggest names in fiction and publishing. A year later I was approached by a publisher to write a gardening book and asked if I could suggest a title. I gave it the question that so many people had asked me over the years: ‘Why Can’t My Garden Look Like That’ and it covers all aspects of gardening from design through to maintenance.

I was very fortunate that the author and broadcaster Josceline Dimbleby had a connection to Kiddington Hall and she agreed to write the foreword to the book. A string of public events took place including book signings and interviews on local as well as overseas radio. It was featured in the Daily Mail and described as ‘a great gardening read’ and it also received reviews in numerous other papers and magazines.

A Short Retirement

Four years ago, at Christmas, I decided to retire. The following February I was approached to re-model an existing garden and to create new features on the grand scale. It was far too exciting a project to turn down. Now nearing completion, during that time terraces, formal rose gardens, lawns, flower borders, topiary, a double ha-ha, wildflower meadows and topiary have all been created around a hillside farmhouse.

With heavy earth-moving equipment, builders, gardeners and other technicians on site I was just glad that I had agreed only to be the design consultant and not do the hard work myself! It has been a wonderful ‘last hurrah’ to a career that I would never have imagined as a young man starting off in a retail in Bourne End. I am sure that much of my success has been down to those early days for I worked with some great shop staff and customers who taught me so much about the rewards of service, loyalty and hard work.

Recently, I met with some of them again after a break of thirty years. Asked to give a talk about the history of Shortlands, the shop, to the Bourne End One Place Study Group I returned to the village, the place where I lived and worked for the first forty years of my life, after far too long away. It was good to be back.

John’s blog, Life in the English Cotswolds, can be found at www.johnshortlandwriter.com. His book is available from Amazon and other booksellers.