JOHN GRIMSHAW is a British plantsman with wide interests across horticulture. He serves as Director of the Yorkshire Arboretum in North Yorkshire, England, and Editor-in-Chief of the International Dendrology Society’s Trees and Shrubs Online, a web-based encyclopedia of woody plants for the 21st Century. (Explore this resource at http://www.treesandshrubsonline.org).
SCOTT BEUERLEIN: When did you know that you had a passion for plants and gardens and how did your path into the profession evolve?
JOHN GRIMSHAW: I was immersed in plants from a very early age, as my mother took me botanizing while still in the pram, and by the age of four or five I had been given my own little plot in the family garden in Sheffield, South Yorkshire. I remember planting pansies there, beneath Crataegus ‘Paul’s Scarlet’, which was the first tree I was aware of.
Growing up in a milder climate in southern England, I again had a designated area, but soon took over the whole of the family garden. I wrote my first piece for the Royal Horticultural Society’s magazine The Garden in 1985, the year I left school. I knew I wanted a horticultural career, but when I said to the careers master that I wanted to train at RHS Wisley he said, “Oh, you can do better than that”–my first experience of the still-prevalent view that horticulture is for thickoes.
In consequence I’ve never had any horticultural training! Instead, I studied Botany at Oxford University, and then to. It really was almost everything!
