The Q&A: Tom Howard, crown prince of all things wordy at the RHS
The Q&A: Tom Howard, crown prince of all things wordy at the RHS
Talking imposter syndrome, drastic career changes and Carol Klein with the RHS’s Head of Editorial
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I know what it’s like to have an existential career crisis. What am I doing with my life? What should I be doing with my life? These are questions that I was feeling my way through long before the pandemic struck, and that then spiralled out of control during the first long lockdown.
I forged my career as a writer, specifically in the world of magazine publishing. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but magazines? Not doing so well! Most of the titles that I’ve worked at over the years have either shut, or are clinging on for dear life. As a result, making a living as a freelance writer is tough going.
This is one of the reasons that this platform, Substack, is such a boon for writers like me: it enables us to connect directly with our audiences. And if we connect strongly and authentically enough, with enough people, then we might even be able to earn a modest living in the process. That’s the hope, anyway.
But I digress. Sort of. I recently met up with an old colleague of mine, Tom Howard. You might know the name. If you don’t, you might at least recognise his happy bespectacled face, smiling up at you from the pages of the RHS’s member magazine, The Garden, of which he is these days the editor.
I first met Tom back in 2011. I was an intern. He was the overworked, under-paid associate editor tasked with feeding the interns journalistic scraps that might lead to a tiny marginal “additional words by” credit. He was, and remains, a lovely man. Unconventional, in a charming way. Quick to laugh, and quick to make others laugh, too.
Not long after we first met, Tom landed himself a job at music bible – and byword for “bleeding-edge cool” – NME, where he worked for six years. Until, that is, the title’s owners closed the print magazine, moved all the content online, and made the entire mag team redundant. Tom lost his job as deputy editor and had the kind of crisis I was referring to at the top of this post.
So Tom did what any highly talented and experienced journalist would, in that context: turned his back on publishing altogether and retrained as a gardener, in his case at Walworth Garden in South London. Fast forward through three years of weeding and pruning and mowing lawns and installing irrigation systems, and suddenly a job comes up. A job which, by now, you’ll know he was awarded: Head of Editorial at the RHS. It’s a lofty title, with equally lofty responsibilities.
As well as being editor of monthly magazine The Garden, Tom also oversees a large section of the RHS website, as well as the books department, a podcast, and a whole load of specialist publications, such as The Plant Review and The Orchid Review. It is a broad remit, and not bad going for a music and lifestyle journalist with a few years’ maintenance gardening under his belt.
I went to catch up with Tom at RHS HQ in Pimlico, though we soon escaped our rarefied surroundings and found liquid comfort in a local pub. We talked about the transition from music to plants, a very real case of imposter syndrome, being starstruck by Carol Klein, and getting kids into gardening.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
When you lost your job at NME, why did you not just look for a role at another magazine? Why the fairly major sidestep into gardening?
NME was really the only job I’d ever wanted. I was 34 when I was made redundant from there, four years ago, and I just found myself in this weird situation where I was like, ‘well I’m 34, I’ve kind of done the only thing I ever set out to do; what the hell am I going to do now? What do I like as much as I like music?’ And the only answer I had to that was gardening.
Where did that love of gardening come from?
That came from my parents. Well, it was dad really who was a very keen gardener – so working for him, in our garden in Devon. In the summer holidays, he’d give me some money to scythe down a massive thicket of brambles, and I’d be there just covered in cuts, hacking through the stuff, but I really liked it. I liked being outside, and I really liked the physicality of it.
And then presumably from the age of 18 until you finally moved into a home with a garden of your own, gardening fell by the wayside.
Yeah, ultimately. But I always had cut flowers. For example, when craft beer was first a thing, I would grow sweet peas, and I would have all my craft beer bottles that I’d drunk on display, each with an individual little sweet pea in. And then when I first moved into a house with a garden, that was when I first started gardening properly. And when I got made redundant – and I can talk about it quite flippantly now, but it was a hard time, because I really didn’t know what the hell I was going to do – it was helpful to be outside and to garden. Just relentlessly garden…
I too have worked at magazines at the end of their natural lives. Sometimes it comes as a shock when a magazine is closed by its owners; other times it’s a depressing, drawn-out process. How were you feeling about working at NME in the build-up to losing your job?
It was great. I worked at NME, as everyone who worked there did, because I’d grown up wanting to work there. As a teenager, it was my dream job. But then you join NME and realise – as everyone who works there realises – that there are these limitations in place. So like, people used to moan about NME, saying, ‘why are they always putting Noel Gallagher or Morrissey on the cover?’ No-one who worked there wanted to do that, but you had to do it, because otherwise no-one would buy it. You’d put Lady Gaga on the cover, even after she’d put out Bad Romance, and no-one would buy it. But then you’d put Johnny Marr on the cover and it would fly off the shelves. Which is insane. But that was the core audience.
I remember that from my time in magazines too, that sometimes the audience you want is not the audience you have, and you end up producing a magazine that pleases absolutely no-one. I wonder, is that something you face in your current role at The Garden: you’re trying to modernise the mag, but possibly your core readership isn’t ready for that?
So The Garden is different, because it is a member benefit, not a newsstand magazine. So it needs to talk to members and be something that they are delighted to receive every month as part of the package of being an RHS member. But the RHS is a very fast changing organisation, and it’s very, very different to what it was probably even five years ago, but certainly 10 or 20 years ago – the audience is much broader. It’s not staggeringly younger – I am young compared to your average RHS member – but there are people who are engaging with the RHS in a way that they weren’t before, so the magazine has got this incredibly broad readership.
Which I imagine is really challenging as an editor.
Yeah definitely. I’m friends with the guy who edits Which? Magazine, and he says the way they approach that is: it’s a mindset. They don’t really think of it in terms of age or gender; it’s for people who want that extra level of research into the products that they’re going to buy. So that’s how I try to think about it with The Garden, is it’s a mindset. It’s people who have decided to become a member of the RHS because they are in some way interested in gardens or gardening. So the age demographic is important – because it tends to be 40+ – but more than that it's a mindset. And ultimately, the thing that most people like it for is the advice and the inspiration, and it sort of doesn’t matter what age you are.
And yet whatever the mindset, you can’t escape the fact that some of your readers will be expert horticulturalists, whilst others will be completely new to gardening.
It’s definitely a challenge. NME was similar, in a way. It was about trying to get that balance between being in-depth for music lovers, but have that dip in, dip out quality for people who maybe aren’t obsessed with The Libertines or whatever. And it’s kind of the same thing with The Garden, trying to make sure it’s not too ‘hardcore horticulture’ that’s going to put off newer members who haven’t been doing it as long, but you don’t want to put off the really experienced people with stuff that they just think is preposterous or too lifestyley. So yeah, it’s tricky.
Is it also freeing, in a way? Because you don’t need to convince people to pick it up off a shelf, you can produce whatever you want…
Yeah, but we have a very vocal membership. Which is good! I’ve worked on magazines where it’s been my job to make up the letters that go on the letters page. You do not have to do that on The Garden, because people feel very engaged with the magazine. Even if it’s complaining about something. And I’m OK with that – I’d much rather have an engaged audience who are annoyed about something than people who are just completely ambivalent.
I’m sure when you were at NME you could be confident that you knew as much about music as your readers or your colleagues – is that still the case at the RHS?
Honestly, the horticultural knowledge coursing through the RHS is astonishing. I thought I knew some stuff, but then you join the RHS and you’re like, ‘oh, I don’t know anything!’ It’s amazing. It’s a whole world of knowledge. But obviously a lot of people who work in the RHS are super sciencey, that’s the way they think. I don’t really have a sciencey brain, I’m a humanities guy, so I kind of see it as my job to turn that deep scientific knowledge into something that your average reader could get into.
I remember feeling a real case of imposter syndrome when I first enrolled on a horticulture course, thinking: but what if everyone knows way more than me? What if I’m getting in way over my head? Did you feel that too, first when you became a professional gardener, and then again when you got your job at the RHS?
Yeah. When I was doing my course, retraining, that was a very inclusive learning environment. But as soon as I started working in gardens, yeah, massive imposter syndrome. It’s easy when there’s a teacher there telling you what to do, but then as soon as you go into someone else’s garden you go, ‘oh god, I better not mess this up.’ And suddenly you realise that this is a real garden and real people and they’re paying you for real work.
But working for the RHS? Yeah, god, intense imposter syndrome. Deep, deep imposter syndrome. But I think it’s been a case of not pretending, and just accepting that the people around me are the experts when it comes to horticulture, and I’m bringing different skills and expertise to the role. And then it’s just about bringing those two together in some kind of magical alchemy.
Your previous life in music and lifestyle publishing saw you rubbing shoulders with celebrities and musicians – how does working in the world of horticulture publishing compare?
Weirdly, I feel almost more starstruck with gardening experts, because I’m sort of cowered by their knowledge. So someone like Dan Pearson, who is a very influential garden designer, he wrote this book about gardening in London, and it was my bible when I was doing my own garden. So when you come face to face with these people… it’s the imposter syndrome again, that risk of seeming like a complete idiot, which is a constant threat! And that existed less with music, because music was my whole thing, for my whole life.
I’ll tell you a big one: Matt Pottage. He’s the curator at Wisley, so if you ever go to Wisley and you see a particularly nice plant combination it will have been something to do with him and his team. He was one of my favourite guys when I was outside the RHS, essentially because he’s on Gardeners’ Question Time and occasionally on Gardeners’ World, and yeah, I was quite starstruck when I first met him. But he’s a lovely guy, and super helpful.
And oh, Carol Klein. It’s just all the TV people. But I think what a lot of people don’t realise about these people, especially someone like Carol Klein, is she’s a real proper expert. A total expert in every possible way.
If your current job hadn’t come along, would you have happily kept on gardening? Were you enjoying it?
Yes definitely, I liked it. I had less money, but being a gardener was nice. I’d start at 8 and finish at 4, so it was really good for picking up the kids and that kind of thing. And then yeah, when it’s 23 degrees, light cloud cover, and you’re there with your pal looking after someone’s garden – absolutely amazing.
And what I loved about it was seeing loads of other people’s gardens. Because there are some amazing houses, and some amazing gardens, in places you would not expect. Like Peckham: some of the gardens round there are absolutely amazing. Insane. People have got these huge houses and they just don‘t have time to look after the garden, so you get access to that. I loved it. But I had no money.
You talked earlier about new ideas within the RHS, and being a part of that change. I feel like the RHS’s position on certain issues has become a bit more campaigny than one might have expected from the RHS in the past, on things like banning floral foam, or going peat-free. Maybe not so much driving change as setting a moral standard.
Indeed, yeah. There was always a thing where the RHS didn’t do campaigns – it was not the done thing. I think we saw our role as being: we’re there to help everyone garden. But I think with things like peat, it became clear that we had to take a stance. It’s got to the point where we have to do this, it’s the right thing to do, and there’s no way we can just say, ‘it’s ok to use peat’. Because it’s not, because at this point it’s harming the planet.
But, we have a responsibility to the industry. A lot of people say to us, ‘why doesn’t the RHS come out and say “ban peat now?”’ And the reality is, if we did do that and the government said, ‘yeah ok,’ and banned peat, large sections of the horticulture industry would collapse. So we see it is as our job to be part of the transition, and to help. We do definitely have a responsibility to help the industry, as well as ordinary gardeners.
There’s been a lot of chat about a post-lockdown gardening boom – eight million new gardeners! – but do you think that is a real thing? And if so, is it sustainable?
I think it definitely was a thing. During the pandemic, traffic to our website went through the roof. And since the pandemic has dwindled, there’s been a rocketing in membership. So I definitely think it is a thing. And then do I think it’s sustainable? Not at that level, no, because people have to go to offices and stuff. But you’d like to think that maybe it has sown the seed of an interest in gardening. And that there’s more awareness of the mental health aspect of it, but also just being a nice way to spend your time, a nice thing to do with your kids, and being able to do it in an urban environment, not just in the countryside.
Tell me about your own garden.
I live in a two-and-a-half bedroom terraced house in London, so I have a small-ish front garden and small-ish back garden. The back garden is on different layers, so the bottom bit of the back garden is quite shady, and at the top it’s south facing, very sheltered. So I’ve got this mixture of aspects and conditions. And I’ve very much gone for low maintenance. Initially I was going for something like Dan Pearson: lots of grasses and perennials. But that didn’t really work because it needed a lot of work. So instead it’s very drought tolerant, lots of self-seeding stuff – I’ve got lots of echiums, lots of nigella, lots of phlomis. I do have grasses, and lots of stuff that’s good in pots for quite a long time, so that I don’t have to change it every year.
But I try to go for low maintenance because, at the end of the day, I’ve got a job, I’ve got two small kids, so I don’t have a huge amount of time to do the garden anymore. I got rid of the lawn, did that whole thing, which gives us more space. Up front is a low maintenance gravel garden. But there’s the odd thing, like, I’ve got a wisteria which does need a bit of love, and a big Rosa banksiae ‘Lutea’ which is nice, but again needs a bit of love. And olives. I’ve got a daughter called Olive, so I planted lots of olive trees. The garden definitely evolves over time, and as you learn more and more about plants you think, ‘yeah I’m going to get that, and I’m going to get that’.
But to be honest, considering I’m trying to garden for wildlife, I don’t have as much wildlife as I feel this deserves. Where are all the tigers and lions? I get stuff like damson flies, but I’ve never seen a hedgehog.
Have your kids inherited your love of gardening?
I’ve found the way to get my kids into it is they’re more interested in the wildlife than they are in the actual plants. So my son, especially, he loves lifting up rocks and seeing what’s underneath them. And they love stuff you can eat, so I’ve gone for loads of Mediterranean herbs, because they're soft and they smell nice and you can eat them.
I did have a garden at one point that I would be telling my children: ‘don’t touch that!’ It just doesn’t work. A) they just ignore me, and B) it stresses me out, and it stresses them out. It’s much better to have something where they can interact and they like the smells and this kind of thing. And they do like the bees. Like, the echiums are just covered in bees – sometimes so many bees that you think it’s literally dangerous for a child to be around them.
Do you get pleasure from gardening?
Yeah, massively. I talk to myself when I’m gardening. It's just a really good way of working through things in your mind. Or, if you’ve had a bad day, just getting a bit of stress out. I like running also, and I get a similar reward from gardening as I do from running: that decompression. And you can feel it all leaving your body, if you garden for just an hour.
Are you an RHS member? Do you read The Garden? Got any questions, comments or feedback for Tom? Now’s your chance!
From the NME to the RHS - a mind-boggling leap. What a lucky readership - looking forward to seeing how things move along. Thanks for another fascinating, insightful interview