Star profiles
Profiles, biogs and more about the RHS stars featured in the programme.
Jill Cherry
Director of Gardens and Estates
Jill Cherry joined the RHS in May 2006. She was previously Director of the VanDusen Botanic Garden in Vancouver. Her family roots are in Surrey where her parents still live.
Jill inherited her dad’s enthusiasm for gardening, however she always thought she would be an artist. This changed in her late twenties: ‘I was actively trying to decide what I was going to do with my life. One day I walked into a Victorian domed conservatory in downtown Toronto, Canada. It was full of palms and vines and tropical flowers and I realised then that I wanted to work in a garden’.
One of her first gardening jobs was as a greenhouse grower - ‘sitting in the basement of the potting shed washing hundreds of 3in clay pots, day after day…’
Jill’s heroes are garden designers Geoffrey Jellicoe and Roberto Burle Marx, both of whom she had the great pleasure to meet and talk with, and who have had a great influence on her.
For many years Jill didn’t have her own garden and never missed it, particularly as she was busy developing gardens professionally. ‘However now I have a small back garden that I have turned into a potager or kitchen garden. It has grown abundantly and I love the daily ritual of picking, cooking and eating.’
Jill’s ideal garden for a lazy afternoon is Courances, just outside Paris.
Tom Stuart-Smith
Designer of the landscaping surrounding The Glasshouse at RHS Wisley
Tom grew up surrounded by plants (‘My parents had a market garden and we were sent to pick fruit and flowers all too regularly’), and he knew he wanted to become a garden designer when, aged 20, he met Lanning Roper. Tom says his plant passion is using plants to make places and create an atmosphere.
One of his greatest learning experiences was working on the early planting of RHS Garden Rosemoor when Chris Brickell was the Director General of the RHS Tom is also a great admirer of the work and style of Piet and Anja Oudolf, who he has got to know over the last 7 years. He adds, ‘Cassian Schmidt at Hermanshoff is a class act, and closer to home James Hitchmough is an inspiration.’
If Tom wasn’t a gardener he would like to be an opera director.
Tom describes his two-acre garden as ‘Quite tidy in some places and very woolly in others; it’s not like the gardens I make for other people, it’s more random and changeable’.
Tom leaves most of the veg growing to his wife Sue, and if he could spend a lazy afternoon in any garden in the world he would choose Rousham (‘My favourite garden in the world, and the best bit is almost entirely devoid of flowers!’).
Luke Lucas and Ben Stokes
Avid orchid growers and exhibitors at RHS shows
Luke and Ben attend Writhlington College, a comprehensive school near Bath.
Luke
Luke’s earliest memory of gardening is planting violas with his Nan. He loves watching plants develop and being able to say ‘I grew that’, and also admiring his collection of orchids.
He counts Alan Titchmarsh, Monty Don and Simon Pugh Jones as his heroes (Simon is Head of Physics at Writhlington College and is responsible for turning Writhlington into a centre of expertise on orchid research and conservation).
When Luke is not in his two greenhouses tending his rare plant collection, or digging on his allotment he loves cycling and travelling and would love to spend a lazy day at Kew Gardens.
His horticultural high point so far was discovering Writhlington had won its first Chelsea Gold Medal.
Ben
Ben believes he inherited his passion for plants from his Granddad who he often helped in the garden. He loves watching small seeds he has sown grow into big plants. His horticultural high was growing his first orchid from seed and watching it flower for the first time.
Like Luke, Ben rates Monty Don and Alan Titchmarsh as his horticultural heroes; ‘They’re both keen gardeners just like I am’.
Ben grows lots of veg in his back garden but would love to spend a lazy day at Iford Manor, where he and Luke work as orchid consultants.
When he’s not gardening, Ben spends lots of time on his other hobby - aircraft.
Both are passionate about: orchids
Helen & David Millner
Orchid growers
Helen Millner is an avid Orchid grower with her husband David. They have exhibited at the London Orchid Show for 10 years. David is a mechanical engineer, and Helen a retired teacher.
They are passionate about Phalaenopsis ‘because they are beautiful flowers, fairly easy to grow, will stand up to a lot of mistreatment, make wonderful houseplants and the flowers last a long time’. This passion gradually developed over the years: ‘You find that more and more of your time and interests becomes taken over with things connected to orchids.’
Helen continues, ‘The problem with having a ‘passion for plants’ is that other things seem to gradually take second place. Their other (often neglected) interests include photography, military aircraft (David!) and computers.
‘We don’t have a garden as such. Our postage stamp at the back of the house is mainly taken up with two greenhouses. The larger one houses the Phalaenopsis and the small one my specialised collection of Restrepia (a botanical orchid), which has been used as the basis for a current research project into propagation; Helen is interested in the conservation and propagation of rare orchid species.
When asked where, in any garden, they’d like to spend a lazy afternoon, David’s response is ‘Chance would be a fine thing!’