Nowadays, gardens are an extension of your home. ‘That has changed completely over the years. ‘Your average garden was a lawn, with borders and a vegetable patch,’ says Ken. ‘My dad didn’t give me any hand-outs, but all my birthday and Christmas presents were spades and forks.’Back in 1966, when Ken started, most people had no concept of landscaping or garden design. He borrowed money from an aunt to buy his first pick-up truck and his parents gave him a mower for his 21st birthday. ‘I decided I was going to do it differently – charging people a regular monthly fee for garden maintenance.’ ‘I’d looked after a couple of gardens for people including the manager of the Festival Hall, so I reckoned there would be a market,’ says Ken. He’d decided he wanted to set up his own landscape gardening business. My old dad reckoned you got a far better education there than at university.’Despite being difficult, he was eventually offered a foreman’s job by London County Council, but, to his parents’ consternation, he turned it down. Parks were great because you mixed with such a vast array of people. They kept moving me from place to place because I was awkward, but it meant I gained a lot of experience. He admits he was a fairly stroppy apprentice. As Ken, like Jack in the novels, was an apprentice gardener with London Parks in the 1960s, it is natural to ask how much of the novels are autobiographical? ‘Not much – it mostly came from my imagination,’ Ken insists, but I’m sure I detect a twinkle in his eye. As well as vivid descriptions of the Mediterranean fauna, it also recounts Jack’s varied sexual conquests during his fortnight in the sun. Two Weeks in Nice is his second and latest novel and follows the exploits of Jack, a young gardener on holiday with his mate in the South of France. You’d think that all this would be enough to keep any 63-year-old fully occupied, but most recently the ever-energetic Ken has also ventured into the world of publishing. I love colourful annuals like begonias, but sometimes the low rainfall in Essex means they are hard to keep from drying out.’ It’s a dry county and most of the soil is clay, which is good for roses and some vegetable crops, but it does create some problems. ‘You get a great diversity of gardening here, from gnomes and coloured paving to parkland estates. Ken describes Essex as a county of keen gardeners. For more than 40 years, he has run his own gardening business and the award-winning company, which moved from Abridge to Epping four years ago, has clients throughout Essex and beyond.
Ken is well-qualified to deal with listeners’ queries. For more than 20 years, he has been answering questions on gardening and his two-hour Saturday morning show is one of the busiest phone-ins on the station. Patrica A.TO listeners of BBC Essex, landscape gardener Ken Crowther is something of an institution. Crowther,įounder of the Indianapolis Prize and former President and CEO of the Indianapolis Zoological Society, Inc. Crowther Indianapolis Prize Endowment Fund Thank you to the following individuals for supporting the legacy of Michael I. To learn about endowment programs and recognition opportunities for your family or organization, please find further information below or contact us. What is worth saving? The Indianapolis Prize is. Please help ensure that we are honored and remembered as a generation who acted, rather than one that just stood by and watched. Please make an endowment gift to ensure that the Indianapolis Prize stands forever. Its Winners and Finalists will be the legends who are studied and honored by future generations.Īnd if there is a wondrous natural world in that future, it will be because the Indianapolis Prize has played an important role. And it is us! The Indianapolis Prize will be as relevant in 200 years as it is today. It is a bridge connecting the people and resources of the developed world with the needs and opportunities of wild things and wild places. The Indianapolis Prize is a lever that enables conservation champions to make lasting changes for our planet. And the Indianapolis Prize has now itself become an essential part of the machinery of conservation. But the Indianapolis Prize helps consistently-successful wildlife conservationists keep those cogs and wheels in place and turning. We’ve seen the disappearance of species cause entire ecosystems to crash. African lions? Lemurs? Bald eagles? Aldo Leopold wrote “To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.” His logic was that when any part of a complex machine is missing, its loss may cause the overall mechanism to fail.
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