They say that from little acorns great oaks grow, but in the case of Robin Hutson, the starting point was in fact a few weeds and a couple of carrots.
After selling his hugely successful hotel chain Hotel du Vin in 2004, Robin was ready to kick back and relax, but a chance encounter in the New Forest quickly changed all that.
“I was planning to put my feet up!” he laughs.
“Then I got a call from Jim Ratcliffe who asked me to help him get Lime Wood (a five-star hotel in the New Forest) open. I was looking at other bits of property that the hotel owned; tidying things up, closing and selling, and there was this little hotel in Brockenhurst called Whitley Ridge…” he recalls. “I went there to have it valued for sale, but when I walked into the kitchen garden I had a lightbulb
