Spear's Wealth Management Survey

From Greenbacks to Green Fingers

Garden therapy, anyone? Mark Nayler meets the men who have bloomed in the business world and don’t mind getting their hands dirty away from the office

'GARDENING IS A thoughtful activity’, writes Robin Lane Fox in Thoughtful Gardening, ‘but thinkers tend to look down on it. It is practical and repetitive, they think, and often very dirty.’

It turns out that for many this is precisely why it is so enjoyable. Blackening one’s fingers with soil is sufficiently different from staining them with red ink to explain why some City figures have chosen it as the perfect foil or complement to their careers. Whether pursuing gardening in parallel to their business occupations or upon retirement, they have thereby found not only escape and relaxation but also a new set of challenges: and the practicality, repetition and dirt are all part of the fun.

For City folk, the main incursion of gardening into their lives is when they’re on leave between jobs, a listless metaphorical engagement. Beyond that, one would imagine they have as much time for gardening as for draughts or watercolour painting. The truth, however, can be seen under their fingernails on Sunday evenings, not at the Bloomberg screens on Monday mornings.

Previously the head of Savills London, Ian Stewart was in the property market for over 40 years. His greatest achievements in business, he says, were the sale of the In and Out Club on St James’s Square and Ascot Place in Berkshire. He retired in 2006 — but, like many, he found the shift from an intense and demanding business career to doing ‘practically nothing’ too much: ‘It was incredibly boring’. When tennis and off-piste skiing could no longer fill the hours, Stewart came out of retirement in 2010 to take up a position as part-time chairman of Prime Purchase, a subsidiary of Savills. And when not there, he devotes his time to his passion: gardening.

Usually measured and understated in his delivery, enthusiasm creeps into Stewart’s manner when he talks of his gardening career. Like many, he was initially hooked by witnessing the ‘little miracle’ of growth. The most basic satisfaction, he says with boyish glee, comes from planting a seed in an allotment, watching it grow and having, in a relatively short space of time, a finished product to eat or simply admire.

Far from being just something to while away the time or empty the mind of the stresses of business and London, gardening is an intensely spiritual experience for Stewart. He is not, he says, ‘religious in the accepted sense of the word’, but by losing himself in his garden, whether in Knightsbridge or in Berwick St John in Wiltshire, he is quietly in touch with processes of reproduction and generation that are ‘fundamental to the universe’. Stewart is careful to stress the limitations of the analogy with organised religion, though: save the odd border dispute, he chuckles, there isn’t much violence involved in gardening. Presumably gardeners do not feel the need to try to destroy their neighbour’s garden if it differs from theirs.

From the seed of Stewart’s enchantment at watching nature at work grew a love for gardening that eventually took him and Savills to the Chelsea Flower Show. In 2006 and 2008, the Savills garden won gold medals, a feat Stewart describes as a ‘very emotional thing’. No wonder: far from gentle pruning on a Saturday morning, building a garden at Chelsea is an extremely competitive business and winning medals requires qualities that Stewart thinks are crucial in business, too.

Chief among them, he says, are patience and dedication, as there is far more to appearing at Chelsea than the week of the actual show. Practicality is not to be derided at this level: plans must be submitted in July of the year before Chelsea, and although applicants find out in October whether theirs has been accepted, building can only start in early May, just three weeks before the show itself.

This process of meticulous planning — ‘one little leaf out of place and you don’t stand a chance’ — building to deadline and eventually, if all goes well, winning a medal, is ‘like a drug’ and has clearly left a deep mark on Stewart. Though his gardening these days is centred on his own gardens and the churchyard he tends in Berwick St John, he admits to feeling a ‘deep urge’ to return to Chelsea, though he doesn’t think he will compete again.

Lane Fox seems to be right in saying that gardening affords plenty of time for reflection: but of equal attraction for people like Stewart is the heat of competition, which demands as much organisation as top-flight business and makes even off-piste skiing seem rather dull. Will he really not return to Chelsea for another hit? He smiles: ‘Maybe — just maybe…’ Retirement, whether from business or gardening, clearly doesn’t suit Stewart.
 

OTHERS HAVE BEEN drawn away from business to gardening to satisfy a desire for creativity. Philip Nixon, founder and managing director of landscape and garden design company Philip Nixon Design, worked with Stewart on the gold-winning 2006 and 2008 Chelsea gardens. Always fascinated by designing and building, Nixon was initially leaning towards studying architecture at university. However, deterred by the prospect of seven years of studying and wanting to make some cash, Nixon chose economics. Afterwards, he started working as a trader for Swiss Bank Corp.

It’s difficult to imagine Nixon, mild-mannered and thoughtful, being totally at home on a packed, windowless trading floor, and sure enough the claustrophobia and pace of life in the City led him to reconsider whether he was really in the right profession.

‘Life is about getting up in the morning and wanting to do what you’re supposed to be doing that day,’ says Nixon — a feeling that did not characterise his days at SBC. He left in 1996 and for four years traded on his own account, an experience that proved ‘profitable but very boring’. In 2000, he’d had enough and quit the City for good. A self-confessed ‘Meccano kid’, Nixon decided he wanted a career in which his creativity could flourish and, feeling that he’d left architecture too late, he headed to the Inchbald School of Design, where he read for an MA in landscape design. After graduating top of his class — ‘I’d never graduated top of anything before that!’ — he had ‘started on the road to garden design’.

Nixon maintains that creativity is the essence of gardening, regardless of the scale or complexity of the project: ‘Even at a very basic level it’s creative. So even if you just have two plants in a window box, you’re designing.’ He stresses the parallels with his first choice of university subject, saying that the creative impulse is just as crucial to both architecture and garden design; the only difference is that gardening ‘deals with outside space rather than inside space’.

It is for this reason that Nixon feels his creativity, after over a decade of being stifled by the demands of trading, is finally yielding results: ‘With houses and architecture people generally have a view, they know what they want. But with gardens, often, they haven’t got a clue, they don’t know where to start.’ Nixon’s conceptions, then, help people articulate and realise visions for their outside spaces — and when they phone up to thank him for a job well done, he says, it is the most satisfying aspect of his professional life.

In gardening, it transpires, practicality can be combined with academia. Charles Mackinnon, founding partner and chief investment officer of Thurleigh Investment Managers, is walking proof of that. ‘I think I’m a practical person’, he says. ‘I can’t bear being in a garden where the path doesn’t go from where you are to where you want to be.’ Mackinnon’s methodical, practical approach infiltrates not only his gardening, but his work at Thurleigh, too. On the day I visited their offices, Thurleigh’s total assets under management hit £300 million.  
  

Illustration by Frann Preston-Gannon
 
 
IT WAS WHILE building the private-client services at Goldman Sachs in the late Nineties that Mackinnon decided to give his long-held passion for gardening an academic grounding. Busy during the day at Goldman, he went to night school several times a week to learn the absolute basics of gardening, studying questions such as ‘What does earth do?’. One might think that anyone with a rudimentary love of gardening would know the answers to such questions, but Mackinnon says he is constantly surprised by the amount of people who have skipped this stage in their learning. Nixon agrees: an occasional teacher of garden design, he says he is ‘amazed by the lack of basic gardening knowledge’ among his pupils.

Mackinnon’s academic and practical approach meant that he wanted to do things as thoroughly as possible. And in studying the academics of gardening (in particular drawing), he gained invaluable tools for translating ideas into reality: ‘It gives you a language with which to express yourself.’ His academic learning came into its own when he took the next step in his gardening career: working for a friend’s garden-design business after finishing at Inchbald. Here he witnessed what might be described as the Chelsea Effect: ‘The week after Chelsea was always a nightmare. People would come with a photo of a Chelsea garden on their phone and say, “I want a garden like this.”’

Clearly, the thrill and creative inspiration provided by Chelsea is not confined to its competitors.

The gap between what people were envisaging after seeing show gardens and what would work in their homes as a usable outside space, though, was often considerable. The gardens providing the inspiration were ‘pure theatre, exquisite confections: [in reality] the tulips, roses and irises don’t all grow at the same time’. They’re not natural in any way? ‘They are about as natural as some actresses’ complexions.’ And, one imagines, they would be just as difficult and expensive to maintain.

The clash between the functional and the aesthetic, or whether there needs to be a clash at all, is an issue right at the heart of gardening, and clearly one Mackinnon feels passionate about. In gardening as in business, focusing on show rather than functionality and suitability doesn’t pay: ‘People think that if you give money to an incredibly famous [wealth] manager, that will be better. It’s like going to an expensive Chelsea gardener and buying a really expensive tree, thinking it’ll transform your garden. No it won’t: it’ll just be an expensive tree.’

The bespoke approach is all-important for Mackinnon, both in gardening and business — making sure the asset allocation is right is 98 per cent of being a good wealth manager, he says. In gardening, he echoes a thought of Nixon’s when he says that scale is not important once the basics are in place: ‘Whether you have a garden the size of a table or Hyde Park, you have to get the arrangement right. Once that’s right, it doesn’t really matter what you put in it.’
 
 
AN INDEFINABLE HARMONY is the aim, says Mackinnon: ‘If you get it so that it looks right, it is right.’ One senses that Mackinnon’s idea of the harmony that can be achieved between aesthetics and functionality is a natural outcome of his dual academic and practical approach. But he’s not earnest about it: when he gardens now it’s to get away from the demands of business (‘You don’t have to be nice to plants’) and because a beautiful garden is a ‘great place to listen to Radio 3’.
 
The ‘thinkers’ quoted in Lane Fox’s opening chapter, then, seem to be mistaken in looking down on gardening for being practical and repetitive, as both of these traits give huge joy to those who love gardens. It can give academic and creative satisfaction, too, as well as being competitive or a perfect foil to the overheated business mind in need of a sabbatical. And thoughts had in the garden, while pruning, planting or listening to Radio 3, often have a far wider reach. In gardening, where all depends upon the seasons, an awareness of the importance and inexorability of change takes root in its enthusiasts.

Nixon is a perfect example: ‘I don’t like things to be static… I like looking forward to things happening, and remembering things happening when they’ve gone by.’ Mackinnon seconds this, saying that gardening ‘reminds you of the realities of life: things die. But so does everything.’ The comfort of the gardener, however, is that next year the plants may bloom again.