Women in Travel Interviews: Anthea Guthrie

My greatest achievement was my first gold medal for ‘The Mayflower’ garden – I produced the ship at dock and displayed plants that would have been taken on the journey and showed how they survived.  On the deck I displayed plants found in the new world.  I lived and breathed the Pilgrims for a year before the show, it was an example of desperate people taking huge risks against all odds to create a new life for themselves.  I do a talk about their journey from a gardener’s point of view – one of my favourite talks.

I realised I didn’t need to carry on with the law after our mortgage was paid off! I put an ad in our local weekly paper to do garden maintenance and spent the extra year pruning and weeding. Then I enrolled on a part time horticulture course at a local college to hone my skills.  Just after that the RHS had their first spring show in Cardiff near where I live and invited the students to produce a garden.  They chose my design and that was my first garden – it featured a washing line with washing made of glass, the judges loved it!  Two years later I did my first Chelsea garden.

My biggest challenge was on my first cruise as a speaker at the beginning of my first talk in front of 400 people. The technician dropped my laptop and broke it so I had to extemporise.  Basically I spent the cruise in my cabin writing up six talks.

I haven’t come across any negativity at all so far, gardeners are really lovely, generous people and that extends to the whole industry. That ingrained ethic where if someone likes something in your garden and you automatically give them a cutting or a root seems universal amongst us all.  Certainly at shows we are always donating to or swapping plants with each other.

I’m a botanic guide now and can offer private tours which include privately owned gardens. We are blessed in the UK with a huge choice of gardens to visit. I am very interested in garden history and enjoy giving guests an insight into the places I take them- anything from ultra formal to folksy cottage to allotments to organic farms. Our heritage is fabulous and it’s so lovely to share it.

I speak on cruise ships and do botanic guiding and talks on smaller expedition ships, it’s opened up the world for me. Last week I was looking at wild orchids on a trek in Chile with the snow capped mountains as a backdrop! I am very, very lucky and it is very good for my geography. Quite honestly my favourite cruise is one I have done for six years running for Botanica which is up the west coast of Britain. I am so proud to be British on that trip, showing guests our most beautiful gardens. Costa Rica comes a close second!

My passions are, after family of course, discovering new places and meeting fellow gardeners. Last year I researched organic farming in Cuba and visited an organic city farm just outside Havana. My husband said he’d never seen me so happy – it was because all the theoretical research I’d done had become a reality right there. I’m planning to volunteer there next year if they’ll have me.

What inspires me are women who have gone ahead and become confident in themselves by taking a leap of faith. They include Marianne North, the spinster vicar’s daughter who travelled all over the world to paint plants in situ – her gallery is in Kew Gardens. I have a soft spot for grumpy Gertrude Jekyll, the Edwardian garden designer who donated plants from her own garden to the war graves in Europe – she wanted our boys to each have a little English garden at the base of each gravestone. Some of the varieties she sent can still be seen.

I am most proud that wherever I’ve lived or worked I’ve planted fruit trees. In the past my predecessors did that for all of us and it’s nice to continue so that future generations will benefit.