"l love a challenge,” says Clare Matterson, which is lucky. Since she took over as director general of the RHS in 2022, times have been tough.
Roadworks have cost an estimated £11 million in lost revenue at the RHS flagship Wisley garden, and The Newt’s headline sponsorship of the Chelsea Flower Show has come to a (scheduled) end before a new sponsor has been announced– although, at time of going to press, there were reports of ‘exciting and unexpected’ conversations taking place – while opposing factions mutter variously about both elitism and wokeism.
Add to that the existential question of how to run a non-profit organisation in the modern world, and she’s had an interesting time.
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“Finances have been a particular challenge, and I won’t apologise for our commercial activities. We have to charge for things like the RHS Chelsea Flower Show because otherwise we wouldn’t have the money to do everything else, including our outreach programmes, educational offering and science research, but it is about finding the balance,” she says. “You need clarity on what you are as an organisation so that everyone understands their part. I am quite good at taking all that messiness and giving it some shape.”
It’s a skillset she’s been building over the past 40 years, working in complex organisations such as the Wellcome Trust and the Natural History Museum (NHM), but it began in 1960s Surrey.
Back then, Clare threw herself into everything so energetically that she was known locally as the child with the permanently scraped knees. When she wasn’t playing outdoors, she was ‘rescuing’ insects that fell into her paddling pool and caring for pets. “I suppose now, we would call it ‘being in nature’. I was lucky to grow up in that world.”
Initially, she was less enthusiastic about school, but both her parents were the first in their own families to go to university and placed high value on education. Her schoolteacher mother seems to have been a particularly strong guiding force.
I have been very lucky in my life. My focus now is on how to spread that luck
“She noticed that I was failing to thrive at our local primary and negotiated a place for me at the private school where she taught. But she also allowed me to go to a rather progressive sixth-form college where it was a bit of a departure to call staff by their first names.”
When a boyfriend casually assumed that she didn’t have aspirations to go to the University of Oxford, Clare was so annoyed that she proved him wrong, and still has the telegram from Jesus College offering her a place to read zoology.
After graduation she took up a research position studying the memory capacity of marsh tits for just long enough to conclude that she was was “too flighty for pure academic rigour”.
Instead, Clare moved sideways to work for an organisation developing university access programmes for people from underrepresented backgrounds, travelled to the USA on a Fulbright scholarship to look at how they tackled such issues there, and met her husband-to-be before homesickness brought her (and him) back to the UK.
There followed a series of plum positions, including a secondment to the Dearing Commission enquiry into the future of higher education and then, in 1999, at the Wellcome Trust. “They had suddenly become the largest medical foundation in the world, and the funders of the first sequencing of the human genome at a time when the public was nervous about GM foods and the implications of these advances.
"It was an exciting but challenging time.” Her 17 years there, she says, “taught me that you can’t just talk loudly at people. You must consider what you are doing in the light of others’ concerns”.
A similar impulse to engage and educate seems to have lured her away to the NHM, where she led another strategy review and laid the foundations of various new attractions, including a reworking of the gardens, which now convey complex evolutionary ideas in a playful fashion.
And then she noticed the RHS vacancy. “I had been a member of the RHS since 1994 but I really had no idea just how wide a range of work to reconcile, re-evaluating its core purposes was a priority.”
Unsurprisingly, her first action in post was to set up another strategic review – “always hard work if done properly”– from which emerged a focus on how horticulture supports wellbeing, social cohesion and environmental engagement, as well as bringing joy into people’s lives.
A similar impulse to engage and educate seems to have lured her away to the NHM, where she led another strategy review and laid the foundations of various new attractions, including a reworking of the gardens, which now convey complex evolutionary ideas in a playful fashion.
This has crystallised into initiatives including a partnership with the Government and the NHM to connect children with the natural world, with a focus on deprived urban areas; a scheme offering £1 tickets to RHS gardens for people on state benefits; and the New Shoots programme, introducing people from diverse backgrounds to career opportunities in horticulture.
It must be more than a full-time job, but somehow Clare also finds time to volunteer with a number of social charities in her home county of Suffolk.
“I have been very lucky in my life. My focus now is on how to spread that luck,” she says. “I probably do too much but, when things get hard, I remind myself that I may not always get things right, but I do always try to.”