But the work became too much. When I was gardening five days a week, I got back injuries. There’s a lot of lower back pain from all the bending over. The heavy lifting and the repetitive tasks can give you strains. The vibrations of the hedge trimmer can hurt your arms. We now have to do yoga and swimming to help our bodies recover.
We ended up selling our business in Oxfordshire to another gardener – while retaining one client whose garden we’ve been working in for 15 years, and which I’m very attached to – for an initial payment of around £15,000.
Then we had another payment the next year of £400 for every contract he had kept and the following year, a payment of £100 for every contract he had kept. We moved to Gloucestershire as it’s a cheaper county and we wanted a better work-life balance.
We’ve picked up four local clients. I work three days a week and spend the rest of the time touring, recording and holding music retreats – which provides another income stream – while my husband gardens four days a week.
In an ideal world, he’d also do three days a week but thanks to then-prime minister Liz Truss’s mini-Budget, our mortgage payments soared by 38pc so he had to pick up an extra day a week.
Our hourly rate varies. In Oxfordshire, because it’s a very affluent area, we charged £29.35 an hour. In Gloucestershire, it ranges from £24.50 to £26.50 as we are still establishing ourselves. We put up our rates every year in line with inflation.
We don’t do anything less than a four-hour session as it’s just not worth it once you’ve driven there and got all your tools out. Our hourly rate may seem quite high but we also have to pay tax, insurance, cover the cost of our tools and our vehicle – and I think it’s reasonable for a gardener with 22 years of experience. I usually garden between 24 and 28 hours a week.
The salary isn’t great. We have friends who are full-time gardeners and they don’t make a lot of money. That’s why we try to do other things as well to make more.
‘We’ve had our fair share of nightmare clients’
Getting paid on time can also be a struggle. We invoice at the end of the month. We have trained our clients to pay us monthly – it is really disappointing when you have to remind people. Our clients are wealthy and we are not. If people don’t pay us promptly, we either tell them to fix that or we tell them we are not the right gardeners for them.
One client came from a stupendously wealthy family. She would take months to pay me. It got to the point where I had to email her after the third or fourth time asking and say: “Look, if there’s a problem let me know because I can’t continue to support your lifestyle.”
That’s not fun. I’m not good at confronting people about money but I’ve had to get better at it, especially when I had people working for me. We sometimes had to pay the gardeners who worked for us before we got paid by our clients.
We have had our fair share of nightmare clients. One client asked me to prune back a box hedge in summer. That is not the right time to do that because it gets “box burn” [when leaves get scorched in the heat]. I explained this, but she insisted so I pruned it and two weeks later it got box burn.
She complained, even though I had told her what would happen. Then she said: “Can you recommend a cheaper gardener?”
I was flabbergasted by the rudeness. You would never walk into a restaurant and ask where you could get a cheaper meal.
In another garden, the clients, an elderly couple, had two big dogs that they didn’t clean up after. I’d be doing the borders and put my hand in dog poo. I decided to place an upturned flower pot over it so I wouldn’t walk in it, or put my hand in it again.
The couple took that as an aggressive action. It wasn’t aggressive – it was just so I didn’t put my hand in the dog poo that they were too lazy to pick up.
We are very selective now about who we work for. All of the gardens we work in are large and offer us all-year-round work.
Having a big garden is a privilege and having qualified horticulturists help you is a luxury. It takes a long time: there’s an oak that we planted for one of our clients and we won’t see that mature. It’s a long game. The clients that understand that are really the best clients to have.
‘It’s a relief that AI isn’t coming for our work’
The best parts of the job are the creativity of the work and being in nature. I also love being my own boss, being physically active and making people happy. Our clients are all nice people and we have good relationships with them.
One client is really ill at the moment and I film a little video of the garden every time I’m there so he can see the delphiniums flowering. It’s also a relief that AI isn’t coming for this kind of work.