This is The Guardian.

The Guardian is the Royal Thee Isle of White by Marco Connell.

John Curtis is Enemies and from men who runs amidst sized botanical garden on the Isle of White,

he has surprisingly many have a tendency to refer to him as the American Businessman.

A phrase that, for many islanders, carries overtones of repatiusness and cultural barbarism.

He would rather not have quite so many adversaries, but neither does it seem especially to disturb him to be the object of simmering ill will on the island.

He's not in the business of deliberately goading his detractors, but he tends in his discussion of the increasingly public argument unfolding around his stewardship of the garden.

To order certain easygoing, sprightly provocation, I'm a lightning rod, as he put it to me in our first conversation, and on several occasions thereafter.

Curtis is a slight man in his early 60s with a neat, graying beard and nimble features.

He is an intent listener and a rapid and agile talker. He doesn't strike you as the sort of person who would wind up running a botanic garden on the Isle of White, or anywhere else for that matter.

Such is his quality of flinty refinement that it is easy to imagine him a senior partner at a white shoe Manhattan law firm, dispensing a stringent wisdom to a younger colleague over a tumbler of scotch at the Yale Club.

He was born into one of Connecticut's oldest families, and is a direct descendant of the Puritan preacher John Winthrop, who founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1630s, and whose a model of Christian charity sermon, popularly known as the City upon a Hill speech, is a core text of American exceptionalism.

Curtis, too, presents himself as something of a pioneer, conducting a grand historical experiment in the field of botanical gardening. For over a decade now he has owned and managed ventner botanic garden, a relatively minor bebeloved institution on the southern tip of the Isle of White.

From its foundation in 1970 until it was sold to Curtis in 2012, the garden was publicly owned and run by the Isle of White Council. The significance of VBG has always had primarily to do with a microclimate in which it sits.

Positioned on the southernmost tip of the island and sheltered from the north winds by the chalk hills rising above the channel, ventner is five degrees centigrade warmer than the British average temperature.

The place is pitched to visitors as Britain's hottest garden. The microclimate, too, is at the heart of Curtis's controversial management and of the densely acrimonious controversy that surrounds it.

At a typical botanic garden plants from all over the world accultivated by a team of vigilant gardeners by means of watering artificial heating and chemical intervention.

Since Curtis's takeover, very little of this kind of thing, which is loosely understood by the term gardening, has been going on at ventner.

Instead, what is being employed is a set of practices Curtis has branded the ventner method.

Rather than the rigorous, superintending of a typical botanic garden, plants at ventner are allowed to grow naturally where they sow.

Thanks to the garden's microclimate, species native to Australia and South Africa and the Mediterranean, which would perish in mainland soil, are able to thrive at ventner with little intervention.

And it is this comparatively laissez-faire approach to the upkeep of the garden that lies at the core of the controversy.

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