Day in the Life of...A Gardener

Historic Royal Palaces Podcast

Historic Royal Palaces

London, Palace, Tower, Historic, Conservation, Royal, Lecture, Learning, Kensington, Hampton, Kew, Banqueting, History, Court, Of, House, Palaces

4.6 • 635 Ratings

🗓️ 1 February 2024

⏱️ 23 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this episode we meet Senior Gardener Jane, who works at Hampton Court Palace. Jane takes us behind the scenes into the Nursery as we contemplate the hard work that goes into creating beautiful gardens. To help contextualise the work of an historic gardener, Curator Lee Prosser takes us on an informative stroll around the gardens that have been worked for hundreds of years.

For the next few episodes, we’re going to be following some of the people who work in our Palaces today. We’ll be exploring how these jobs have a historic context to them, and how surprisingly, there are similarities in the work they do now, from the work that was done in the past.

To find out more about the forgotten stories of those who worked at the royal palaces over 300 years ago, a new exhibition is opening at Kensington Palace.

https://www.hrp.org.uk/kensington-palace/whats-on/untold-lives/

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to the Historic Royal Palaces podcast.
0:05.0	For the next couple of episodes we're going to be following in the footsteps of the people who love and look after our six palaces.
0:12.0	As a charity, we're responsible for the very foundations of the buildings in which we work, as well as telling their histories and stories, and we do this in many different ways.
0:23.6	But the palaces have always been a place of work for many, and in this series we want to explore the jobs from the past and how to a certain extent they still exist today.
0:33.6	From the bricks and mortar behind the scenes to how visitors are welcomed at the Tower of London,
0:40.3	let's explore a day in the life of these historic jobs.
0:43.3	It's very cold today.
0:57.0	It's, I think, about between two to three degrees.
1:01.0	But it's sunny, which is nice because we've had a few weeks of rain, so it's cold, but I think most people prefer this.
1:08.0	At the moment we're in the nursery. At the moment in here is just
1:13.6	the winter plants that are tender. So we've brought those in to protect them. A lot of
1:18.6	the bedding plants have been brought back in here. This actual nursery greenhouse is called
1:23.6	the multi-span and in the summer all the bedding plants are grown by the nursery in here but yes we've been started since 745 which was
1:33.5	very cold and very dark but we get in here about 730 have a cup of tea discuss
1:39.1	what we're doing and then we go out to work the nursery buildings and
1:43.5	greenhouses are off from the wilderness section
1:47.4	of the gardens. So where the wilderness toilets are, you go through from there, you get to the
1:53.6	greenhouses and that's where all the estate offices are. The garden is mess room, different things
1:59.5	we use. All the tractors are kept here and also where the nursery work full-time
2:04.6	and there's about seven or eight large greenhouses which they use.
2:09.6	The nursery is run by a separate team of staff from the gardeners.
2:15.6	So we have the estate teams which is run by another manager.
	...

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