FEATURE: Everything in the garden is rosy for Beningbrough Hall's Steve

BE honest, if you tend something like a grapevine every day you’re not really going to notice how much it has grown. But if you look after the same one for a quarter of a century, well that’s a different story.

The vine in question is at Beningbrough Hall, where gardener Steve Hodges is celebrating 25 years of nurturing the giant climber. In 1992 it was barely as tall as him. Now it fills the entire glasshouse in the stately home’s walled garden.

Not that Steve’s duties are confined to viticulture. Not by any means. In his time the walled garden has been transformed from a bland lawn into a thing of diverse beauty, with perennial filled borders and gravelled paths.

It’s the same over at the Italian border. When Steve clocked on for his first shift it was an entirely different vista. Now look at it. And how many of you have admired the cream blooms every spring on Beningbrough’s huge magnolia tree? Yes you guessed it. That was one of Steve’s early saplings too.

“One of my first jobs was to plant a herb bed under the pear arch,” he says. “I remember those days well because when I started here we only had one tractor, a couple of lawn mowers and some hand tools, which were kept in an old wooden shed.”

It may be a bit different now, but one thing hasn’t changed; the weeding still has to be done by hand. “It’s the same with planting, staking and dead-heading,” says Steve. “I also do a couple of days a week at Treasurer’s House and there we use no power tools at all, which means mowing the lawn by hand with an old Webbs push machine.”

Steve Hodges walks through the Italian garden at Beningbrough Hall

Being a charity the National Trust maximises its resources with volunteers working alongside the gardening team. “For me that’s half the fun, working with different people as part of a team” says Steve. “Seeing everywhere looking so fantastic is really satisfying. You could say I’ve always liked a challenge.”

Which is just as well because Steve is about to witness another exciting phase in the Hall’s gardens. From early autumn the first construction work of Andy Sturgeon’s long term vision will get underway in the pergola garden by the restaurant. This will eventually see big changes, albeit sympathetically to the history of the garden.

“The plans include a Mediterranean garden with water feature and streams coming down, paths, seating and low planting,” says Steve. “I think the next few years are going to be at least as exciting as my first 25.”

That said some of Steve’s work is away from public gaze. The National Trust also has 380 acres of parkland at Beningbrough, it’s his job to rally the volunteers and fettle the wood chip paths. Then there are branches to collect, which end up as logs you can buy to put on your fire at home.

But being a gardener at a major tourist attraction means much of Steve’s labours are done under the close scrutiny of paying visitors. And they do like to ask him for some tips.

“I rather like discussing gardening with visitors, its part and parcel of working here,” he says. “Sometimes they’ll take the time to come back and say ‘we did what you said and it solved the problem.’ That’s nice.”

So does he have a favourite place in the grounds at Beningbrough?

“I suppose if pushed I’d have to say the walled garden. I spent a lot of time in here, getting it from the bare minimum and grass to what it is today and I’m looking forward to what it will continue to develop and be. But we’ve achieved a lot everywhere in the last 25 years. What you see is our collective handiwork and I’m very proud to have been part of it all.”

Steve Hodges at Treasurer's House

Clearly the gardens at Beningbrough Hall are unrecognisable from the ones Steve began working on a quarter of a century ago. The same goes for Treasurer’s House in the city centre, which for the last three years has won gold in Yorkshire in bloom under his stewardship. But with stoic aplomb, Steve takes all this success in his stride.

“At the end of the day this is like any other job and it’s for other people to come in and enjoy what we as a team have produced,” he says. “I’m perfectly happy with that.”

• Beningbrough Hall, Gallery and Gardens and Treasurer’s House are open daily throughout July and August.