The Director of Gardens and Shows at the RHS on her life as bouncer, staying calm in a crisis and engaging children and new entrants to gardening. Portrait by Andrew Montgomery
Helena Pettit is the kind of woman who makes ordinary mortals seem a tad underpowered. For a spot of relaxation after a busy show season, she chooses a 100km kayak trip up the coast of Norway, beaching her craft and wild camping by night. Her garden in Kent, she confesses, is often a little neglected, as she spends so many weekends away, hiking with a band of equally energetic and outdoorsy friends.
She is a second degree Dan black belt in Kyokushinkai karate – retired, she hastens to point out, although she used to fight for the Great Britain squad in her youth (she says it wistfully, although she is only in her forties – a mere stripling in the world of gardening). She has faced off attackers in dodgy nightclubs (no doubt in high heels – Helena is exceptionally glamorous), and trekked through the Andes in Peru. Yet she considers herself the least adventurous in her family: her brother ran off at 17 to join the French Foreign Legion.
Her mum, who disapproved of all that fighting, is delighted to see her tomboy daughter end up with a nice ladylike job – first as Director of Shows at the RHS, then in 2020 adding the Society’s five gardens and retail to her portfolio. She is shortly to hand over responsibility for the gardens as she takes on a new role, as director of commercial and innovation, and can barely contain her anticipation.
“The opportunities for doing new things are so exciting. At a certain level, you see things that people don’t always see when they are so closely involved with the subject matter, so you can spot the opportunities, perhaps because you are not so wedded to the ways that things have always been done. And once I see a new direction, I really enjoy investigating what it could bring to support the RHS. It’s great to embrace change: I believe, where there’s a will there’s a way.”
Helena has always had a prodigious energy. Her first job was working for champagne house Moët & Chandon by day, while working as a bouncer and teaching karate by night. She went on to build a career in marketing and event planning, working in a variety of sporting arenas from motor sport to the Horse of the Year Show.
For a decade she ran the Grandstand Group, whose interests included NAEC Stoneleigh, the Warwickshire showground famous as the site of the former Royal Show and more recently various other agricultural shows. (There are, it turns out, an extraordinary number of synergies between the Grassland & Muck Show and the RHS Chelsea Flower Show.) “But you reach that age,” she explains, “when you think it would be really lovely to go and do something that would increase the income for a charity that does great work.”
So when the role came up at the RHS, she jumped at it. She didn’t, she confesses, really expect to get the job, expecting her lack of horticultural knowledge to stand in her way. “But I knew I could learn what I needed to about the horticultural side.” Helena is a great believer in lifelong learning, with a wide range of interests from natural history to digital transformation in business. (Though quite how she manages to fit education courses into her busy schedule is a matter of wonder.)
The challenge, when it came, was nothing to do with horticulture: Helena had barely got her feet under the table when the coronavirus pandemic struck in the spring of 2020, and the entire show schedule went up in smoke. But in a career in events management, she says, you get used to dealing with crises. She ascribes her unflappability to her years as a female bouncer, working in night clubs where her male colleagues wore stab vests. “It gives you the confidence to deal with all manner of situations: you get used to just facing into challenges. There isn’t much that fazes me, and sometimes maybe I should be fazed more, but I firmly believe that there’s always a way through whatever is facing you. And the team at the RHS is amazing.”
It’s not always a picnic. She is used to coping with emergencies from gas leaks to sudden deaths, but there’s not much she can do about the weather: the unceasing rain that turned the Hampton Court Flower Show 2021 into a mud bath (with not a bag of bark to be had anywhere in post-Covid Britain), even a tornado over Tatton Park.
But the successes more than make up for it: hugely popular new show categories such as the House Plant Studios, and Balcony and Container Gardens at Chelsea; and initiatives to support the nursery trade and tempt them back to the shows, and to engage children and new entrants to gardening. She is especially proud of a new access scheme to allow those on Pension Credit or Universal Credit to visit RHS gardens for just £1.
Next year will see the launch of new shows, including a major indoor Urban Garden show in Manchester. And she has one more exciting announcement to make: the launch of the first RHS store on the high street in October. There will be house plants galore, workshops and expert advice. Predictably, she just can’t wait to see it.