This is The Guardian.

The Guardian Archive Long Read.

Hi, my name is Mark O'Connell and I'm the author of Battle of the Botanic Garden, the Horticulture War Roiling the Isle of White, which was published in the Guardian Long Read in January, 2003. This is a story about a dispute over a beloved botanical garden on the Isle of White.

The garden was bought by a wealthy American businessman who took a kind of a rewilding approach

to the botanical garden, which proved extremely controversial, in particular with the charitable

organization that partly funds the garden.

Like a lot of my sort of favorite things that I've written over the years, this story idea

actually came from an editor, in this case David Wolfe, the Long Read's editor.

If I remember right, David was on holiday on the Isle of White and was like looking through

the local newspaper and saw this small kind of, you know, local news story about a dispute over

the direction being taken by this botanical garden and Ventnor. I thought it might be something

that I would get my teeth into and he was completely right. The story, to me, seemed to have a very

appealing quality or set of qualities. It was set on an island for one thing and that's very

appealing to me. And it was about a very intense dispute one thing, and that's very appealing to me.

And it was about a very intense dispute over something quite distinctive, something quite small and circumscribed, but which actually opened out into a much larger sort of questions about society.

So one thing that I think about when I think about this story is how I felt in a way that's quite unusual for me,

actually quite a lot of sympathy for everyone who I spoke to and for kind of every point of view in the piece. This is a story about like a wealthy American entrepreneur who privately purchased

a previously publicly owned amenity. And so in theory, John Curtis should be kind of a perfect villain from my own, at least my

own personal political point of view.

But one of the reasons I love doing this kind of writing is that those conceptions that

you often go into a story with often don't survive contact with the reality in all its

kind of complexity and ambiguity.

...