From typist to lawyer to award-winning garden designer, Anthea Guthrie now teaches gardening to children with special needs and travels the world giving talks. She tells Alison Young why she thinks she now has the best job in the world
It was a tree growing outside her office window in Windsor Place, Cardiff, that finally made Anthea Guthrie turn her back on the law and follow her gardening dreams.
“I used to sit in my office and look at this tree day after day, week after week and month after month as it changed during the seasons until I couldn’t stand it any more,” she says.
“I’m a very active, physical person and I hated being cooped up indoors sitting at a desk.
“I was desperate to be outside and I found it really frustrating to be inside and watching that tree outside my window just drove me mad.
“After being a typist when I was younger, I knew what it was like to have a boring job and my main thing after that was never to be bored in work. And although the law didn’t bore me, I couldn’t cope with being inside.”
So after 20 years working as a lawyer, Anthea embarked on a second career as a garden designer and in no time at all was picking up awards at Royal Horticultural Shows all around the country for her show gardens – including medals from the most famous flower show in the world, the Chelsea Flower Show.
She now teaches gardening to children with special needs with one of her schools, Heronsbridge School in Bridgend, becoming the first special school in the country to open to the public under the National Garden Scheme (NGS) next weekend.
After that Anthea will be opening her own garden at Moulton in the Vale of Glamorgan for the NGS and taking her latest show garden – a low budget community entry – to the Hampton Court Palace Flower Show.
And only last week she returned from one of around six cruises that she goes on every year, during which she gives a series of gardening talks.
It’s all a far cry from the years dressed in suits and trapped behind a desk when she worked as a family lawyer.
“I met my old boss for lunch the other week and she told me that I was making her really unhappy because I had such a great lifestyle!” smiles Anthea, 60. “It’s true – I can’t believe that people pay me to do something I love. I think I have got the best job in the world.
“Gardening isn’t as lucrative as the law but there are so many perks and my work life balance now is amazing.
“I get to work with children which I love, I get time off when I want so I can visit my grandchildren, I don’t have to buy all those horrible black suits for the office and I even get to go on loads of cruises in exchange for giving a couple of talks on gardening.
“All this is as a result of me giving my own son career advice at the age of 18. I told him, ‘Don’t do dentistry, the law or engineering – do something you love’ and so he did music which he adored,” adds Anthea, who lives with her husband Alistair, who makes pancakes for a living after selling his conveyancing business some years ago.
Despite taking up gardening as a career later in life, it was something that Anthea had loved since childhood.
One of her earliest memories is sticking her nose in her mother’s flower beds as a child growing up in Newcastle.
“I remember quite clearly looking at these little purple anemone flowers and thinking that they looked just like my mother’s jewels – her amethysts.
“I come from a family of gardeners – both my mother and grandmother were keen gardeners and although I had a little patch at home I don’t think I grew anything there other than weeds!”
It was at primary school that she made her first successful foray into horticulture.
“I went to this little Victorian village school and we were all given a patch of about a foot of very poor soil next to the canteen which received hardly any sun.
“I grew nasturtiums as they were about the only thing that would grow there but I remember being absolutely amazed at how wonderful they were. I thought they were simply spectacular.”
It was years later as a young bride that she got her first garden in Wiltshire, learning as she went along – gradually picking up knowledge which she started to put into practice after moving with her husband to a cottage with a one-acre garden near Brecon.
“It was a small house with a big garden – exactly what I was looking for.
“We planted a vegetable garden and an orchard there.
“I was working as a typist at the time so I didn’t have a lot of money but I was able to create a lovely garden. The orchard that I planted is still there today.”
In fact Anthea has a bit of a legacy of planting trees for in her next garden in Cardiff she planted an almond tree, which she can also admire when she drives past.
“It’s huge – you can see it from the other side of the road.”
It was while living in Cardiff in the early ’80s with her then four-year-old son that she decided to take her first major new direction in life by going to Cardiff University as a mature student.
“I never thought that I would be bright enough to go to university as I was hopeless at school.
“I didn’t work and I think I walked around in a daze most of the time. I was really short sighted and for some reason I didn’t wear glasses.
“I have the Open University to thank for getting me back into education as I did an Open University entrance exam and was able to go to Cardiff where I did a legal conversion course.
“I can’t sing the praises of the Open University enough – if it wasn’t for that organisation I would never have had the confidence to do and achieve half of what I have done in my life.”
It was through studying the law that she met her second husband: next page
‘);
tm.siteLife.daapi.getArticle(
“54-91466-31186233”,
function(article){
tm.siteLife.display.displayCommentCount(
article,
‘sitelife-commentsWidget-middle’,
false,
‘Comments’,
true,
false
);
}
);
})();//call anonymous function
//]]
Speak Your Mind