John Massey attributes his long career at Ashwood Nurseries to happenstance, and the creation of his own private garden has similarly come about through coincidence and luck
WORDS & PHOTOGRAPHS CAROLE DRAKE
Nurseryman and plant breeder John Massey might never have made a garden, had it not been for meeting the late Princess Greta Sturdza, force of nature and creator of Le Jardin de Vasterival in Normandy. “She was mad about hellebores, came over to the nursery to buy some and invited me to visit her garden – although the first time she asked I came up with some feeble excuse because I felt way out of my comfort zone,” John recalls. The second invitation came with the warning that it would be the last, so John accepted: “Her garden was the greatest I’ve ever seen, and I learnt so much from her,” he says. “Afterwards I had to make a garden. I had no choice.”
Before that ‘road to Damascus’ trip to France, all John’s time and effort went into his nursery near Kingswinford in the West Midlands. Like many aspects of his life in plants it came about by happy accident rather than careful planning: “My father bought Ashwood on a whim when it was a tumbledown wooden shack full of mice and birds, as a way to keep our gardener in work when we moved to a smaller house and no longer needed him.”
The gardener soon moved on, but John started working there the day after he left school in 1967 and never looked back. Within a decade and with the help of a small, dedicated team, John turned Ashwood into a thriving nursery and garden centre and went on to run breeding programmes for an array of plants including dwarf conifers, hellebores, cyclamen and hepaticas, collecting armfuls of RHS gold medals along the way.
From an early age John noticed plants. He first “got hooked” on the wild primroses he saw on weekend drives in the countryside, and his first encounter with hepaticas came at the tender age of five: “When we moved house, Hepatica nobilis was flourishing and seeding itself about in the garden below a huge sycamore where nothing else would grow.” Hepaticas would later become an abiding passion for him. During a holiday in the Lake District when he was 11, John spent most of his time at a small nursery in Grasmere which “had all the original gentians from the Purdom and Forrest expeditions. I must have tormented the hell out of the nurseryman, but he taught me a huge amount and encouraged me to join the Alpine Garden Society, which
