Green fingers and a business head

IT’S a broiling day in mid August when even the ducks on the pond look hot. Keith Weed, the newly appointed president of the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS), is out in the garden that surrounds his 15th-century timber-frame farmhouse in Surrey. ‘You’ll find him in the border,’ says his wife, Kate, an artist, who is accompanied by two border terriers, Biscuit and Bear, named—Mr Weed tells me later—by their children, two sons and a daughter, all of whom are now grown up.

Sure enough, we discover the president crouched inside the suitably impressive herbaceous border between the cosmos