In Aid of
Threatened Plants Appeal, National Trust of Scotland
Amount donated: £12,326
The first step toward enhanced protection for the charity’s magnificent gardens, the purpose of the Threatened Plants Appeal is to create additional recourses for the Trust to combat today’s, and prepare for tomorrow’s, horticultural challenges. These challenges include unknown diseases caused by climate change that spread globally.
Only the National Trust for Scotland has the scope to present all of Scotland’s horticultural heritage to the public, with some 1.9 million visitors enjoying the spectacle every year. In many cases, such as the South American collection at Arduaine, these plants offer unique insights into the gardens of the past.
The Trust is campaigning for the Scottish Government to coordinate strategic plans to cope with climate change. The charity is working hard to prepare for what may lie ahead should a new disease strike.
As the effects of climate change start to reach across the globe, we have an added responsibility to conserve rare species in our care whose original habitats are being compromised. Replacement from native resources may become impossible in the future.
Today’s threat: Phytophthora ramorum Sudden Oak Death.
This devastating fungal disease infect many plants, but especially rhododendron and viburnum. It spreads easily by wind, rain and carried by animals. Infected specimens must be destroyed, along with nearby plants, to prevent the spread.
Tomorrow’s Threat: How to secure our collections in the long term?
The Threatened Plants Appeal will begin the process of building up our resources to give us strength in depth, in manpower, equipment and through campaigning partnerships with our gardeners in Scotland. To be certain that capabilities are sustainable, we need more resources, beginning with funding so we are delighted to be chosen as this year’s appeal at today’s lunch.
Chair
Anne Mason Brown
Originally from Edinburgh, Anne moved to London after her first job with an Edinburgh Fund Management Group, followed by 10 years with City stockbrokers and then a change of direction into recruitment. She was with the same long established firm for 25 years, as a Managing Director building their financial services (private equity, fund management, banking, latterly hedge funds) practice and balancing this with working with charity clients.
She led a buy out of the recruitment and recruitment advertising businesses in 2003 and exited Q4 in 2008. She's now retired.
"Firstly, I must thank Julie Edmonstone and Carol Mitchell. Carol, who runs the London office of the National Trust for Scotland, conceived the idea of a Women of Achievement Lunch in London and brought together the committee for our first Lunch last year, which was a great success. Julie Edmonstone, our inaugural Chairman, played a key part in getting us started and a special thank you is due to her for giving so generously of her time and experience.
We were determined, whatever the economic climate this year, to build-on the success. We had three wonderful speakers last year: Elizabeth Gloster, Susan Hampshire and Joanna Trollope. We are delighted to have equally special and interesting guest speakers and I can’t thank them enough for so generously coming to share their thoughts and experiences with us today.
The aim of the Lunch is to bring together some of Scotland’s most successful women, from a wide variety of fields and to celebrate their achievements. The spirit of the event is to meet and make interesting new friends. We have tried not just to seat together people who know each other, but to bring together those we feel have interests in common who may not have met before.
The Lunch is also to raise funds for The Natioal Trust for Scotland and this year to raise awareness of the Trust’s Threatened Plants initiative.
Thank you from all the Committee for all your support today."
Sponsors
Speakers
Debs Goodenough
Debs is the Head Gardener to HRH The Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall. Raised on a small mixed farm in north western Alberta, Canada, Debbie (Debs) is the youngest of four girls to Eastern European parents. Her gardening inspiration came from her mother who – along with keeping the house, milking the cows and raising children – tended an acre of vegetable garden to sustain the family through the year and another acre of ornamental garden for pleasure; at 89 she still keeps a large garden.
Training initially in horticulture in Canada, Debs combined her desire to travel with training in her chosen profession by working as an intern at Denver Botanic Gardens before coming to Britain to train at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Although she planned to return to Canada, it was here that she met her husband, Simon, as a supervisor at Kew and carried on to work at Kew for IUCN in plant conservation.
Having moved from London, ten years were spent working with her husband at Ventnor Botanic Gardens on the Isle of Wight where she ran the nurseries and the show houses. Debs then became Head Gardener at Osbourne House, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert’s country home, where she co-ordinated the restoration of this 300-acre estate and managed other historic landscapes for twelve years. From here she has recently taken on the position as Head Gardener to HRH The Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall with gardening responsibilities in all their properties, which are run organically.
The mother of two teenage sons, Debs spent many family holidays and trips visiting other gardens and temperate areas, plant collecting, guiding tours and networking within the horticultural world. She is a former Secretary of the Professional Gardeners’ Guild, and travels between their two homes in the Isle of Wright and Gloucestershire, gardening in both.
Fiona Armstrong
As a producer, writer and presenter, Fiona’s work involves her with the news, features and sport. Viewers in Southern Scotland will know her for fronting the evening news programme for ITV Border. In that role she has just returned from Cambodia where she was making films on the removal of landmines. Other recent work includes a series called “River Journeys”, which took her on adventures along northern English and southern Scottish rivers; another series “Reivers” which looked at Borderland history. Fiona also makes fishing films for Sky TV.
A former ITN newscaster and reporter, Fiona fronted all the main news bulletins there. Major stories included the plight of AIDS orphans in Africa and the Lockerbie air disaster. She has also worked for GMTV, BBC World News, Carlton Food Network, NBC and BBC Radio 2 and 4. Her programmes covered subjects from fishing to cooking and health to antiques.
She has written two cookbooks and two fishing books, and she contributes to magazines and newspapers. Her specialities are the news, the countryside, and Scottish history – she has made more than a dozen films and videos on Scottish clans. She is currently writing a book on one of her family members who was a confidante of Queen Victoria. In her married life she is Lady MacGregor of MacGregor and likes to fish and cook.
Lucinda Lambton
Lucinda Lambton is a writer, photographer and broadcaster who noses out historic and architectural flights of fancy, laced through with revelations that set out to give astonishment, interest, laughter and delight! She has researched, written and presented some fifty five programmes for the BBC as well as approximately twenty five films for ITV.
Four films for ITV on the architectural and historical delights to be found in London’s suburbs, entitled Sublime Suburbia, won the Regional Television award for the best documentary series of 2003, as well as Best Television Presenter nomination for Lucinda. She was a subject of the BBC Favourite Things series one of six half hour portraits – also included was one of Lady Thatcher.
Lucinda is married to the distinguished journalist Peregrine Worsthorne and lives with him and two dogs in Buckinghamshire. She has two sons by a previous marriage.