Mottistone garden volunteers paused as National Trust faces fallout over culture claims

Mottistone Manor garden on the Isle of Wight has paused its volunteer gardening team this summer, a move that left a core group of 13 volunteers aged between 50 and 80 stunned and seeking answers. The National Trust says the pause is part of a review intended to ensure staff and volunteers work within a respectful and inclusive culture, but the volunteers say they have not been given specific examples of what went wrong and have been left without a clear path forward. The abrupt decision has left a once-celebrated garden, lauded for decades for its roses, hedges and kitchen plots, looking overgrown and under maintained as visitors and supporters wonder what comes next.

The Mottistone garden has long been the pride of the Trust’s portfolio on the remote western edge of the island. Designed in the 1960s by Lady Vivien Nicholson and drawing on a Sicilian sensibility, the garden has featured in national broadcasts, Gardeners' Question Time appearances and, in 2015, provided the setting for Benedict Cumberbatch's wedding to Sophie Hunter. Its top meadow and surrounding trees were fenced for the ceremony, a moment many locals still recall as a high point in the garden’s storied history. Yet in recent months the Sunday-to-Friday rhythm of the Friday Gang—so named because most volunteers arrived to work on Fridays—has given way to silence and uncertainty.

The Friday Gang, as they are known, formed the backbone of the garden’s upkeep for years. Many members had volunteered for more than a decade and juggled duties from hedge-cutting and edge clipping to managing the kitchen garden and coordinating seasonal displays. They formed friendships that extended beyond gardening days—hosting social events at members’ homes and contributing to the broader Island community through the local church and horticultural society. The group’s experience, they say, was a critical asset to the garden’s ongoing beauty and visitor appeal.

Their departure began with a June 19 email that suspended all volunteering with immediate effect while a review was conducted. In the weeks that followed, the Trust sent messages describing concerns about the volunteers’ attitudes and values, indicating they did not align with the charity’s inclusive culture. The volunteers say the notices changed repeatedly and offered no concrete examples, leaving them perplexed and anxious about the garden’s fate. They offered to increase their hours to keep the garden on track while a head gardener recovered from what they believed might be personal health issues, but the subsequent communications did not clarify the plan or the criteria by which the review drew conclusions.

The volunteers recount a shift that began when a new head gardener, Claire Margetts, arrived in April 2024 as a stand-in while a permanent appointment was sought. They invited Margetts into the garden community and assisted with lodging and meals, hoping to support her in the crucial spring season. They also took pride in sharing decades of horticultural knowledge, noting that several had run their own gardening businesses or studied garden design. In the weeks that followed, however, they observed major changes, including the removal of the famed rose garden and its replacement with a Sicilian-themed palette featuring new roses and cosmos, as well as a redesign of the red, gold and blue border in front of the manor that introduced dahlias and daisies. Visitors began asking questions about the changes, and some Volunteers felt the shifts were made without adequate explanation or consultation.

As maintenance lagged, the volunteers say they were reassigned to more routine, less specialized tasks—deadheading every few stems of certain perennials, weeding gravel, and other duties they viewed as basic rather than garden-wide stewardship. A handful also reported feeling marginalised and sidelined from conversations about the garden’s future. One longtime member, who had helped lead a kitchen garden operation with seedlings propagated by a volunteer, said that their role had diminished and that they no longer felt valued. Another member left in December, citing that the work did not reflect what they had signed up to do. The mood among the Friday Gang grew tense as the summer wore on, and the email of June 19 only deepened the sense that the trust had chosen to move away from long-standing volunteer-led maintenance.

The National Trust said it conducted a review with the aim of ensuring that both volunteer and staff teams could thrive in a positive, respectful and welcoming environment. In a statement, it said that after the review, some volunteers chose not to continue and that the Trust respects those decisions. However, the response did not provide specifics about the alleged behaviors or the criteria used to determine the need for a broader shift in staffing, prompting questions from other volunteers, conservation groups and admirers of the garden. Critics say the lack of transparency mirrors other high-profile volunteer disputes and could carry broader implications for the charity’s engagement with older volunteers, a core constituency of its nationwide network.

The timeline and the scale of the changes have stunned those who know the site best. Graham Field, 76, who has worked at Mottistone for 12 years, described the garden as a place of shared purpose and companionship as well as horticultural excellence. He said the garden’s current appearance, with overgrown hedges and patchy grass in parts, contrasts starkly with the well-kept, flourished spaces that guests had come to expect. He noted that the rose garden’s transformation and the replacement of the borders with a more contemporary planting scheme had altered the garden’s character and left visitors asking questions the volunteers could not answer because they were no longer in control of the space.

Other volunteers who spoke to the press described the situation as distressing and bewildering. They stressed that they had never engaged in political or divisive discussions while working in the garden and that they had always aimed to welcome visitors with warmth. They took particular issue with the idea that their attitudes and values about inclusivity were the root cause of the problems, arguing that their work had always been about care for the plants and the community around them. The group emphasized that they had never received formal feedback or written notes detailing any concerns they should address, and they questioned how a pause could lead to a broad cultural critique without concrete examples.

For its part, the Trust has said that it cannot comment on individual cases to protect confidentiality, but it reiterated that the review was meant to ensure the gardens’ future care and that volunteer and staff teams can thrive in a positive environment. The statement stopped short of outlining a clear path forward for the Mottistone volunteers or detailing any next steps for the garden’s upkeep in the absence of the Friday Gang. The lack of a transparent plan has left many visitors and supporters worried about the garden’s near-term future and whether the site will be able to maintain its reputation for beauty and hospitality in the months ahead.

The episode at Mottistone is not the only instance in which the National Trust has faced questions about its handling of volunteers and its approach to staff culture. Advocates for volunteer groups point to parallel cases, including a high-profile pause at Dunham Massey Hall in Cheshire earlier this year, where volunteers were asked to pause work while administrators reviewed how to align operations with conservation goals. Critics say such pauses, without clear explanations to those affected, risk eroding trust and dampening the goodwill that many volunteers invest in the organization over years or even decades. Restore Trust, a watchdog group, notes that older volunteers have fed into a broader concern that the Trust’s leadership may be reorienting the organization away from its traditional volunteer-based model toward a more staff-centric model.

As the summer wanes on the Isle of Wight, the garden’s current state continues to reflect the absence of the Friday Gang’s day-to-day care. The kitchen garden sits largely empty with only a few carrots and remaining pumpkins to show for recent efforts, while sections of the lower garden have been closed or left with minimal maintenance. The rose garden, once a symbol of the site’s seasonal fragrance and color, now shows bare soil in places where it once bloomed with abundant shrub roses. The Trust maintains that changes are part of a deliberate plan to secure the garden’s long-term care, but for the volunteers who formed the garden’s community, the impact is deeply personal and lasting.

In the absence of a clear explanation, the volunteers fear for the garden’s future and for the relationships that once bound the Friday Gang to the estate. They speak softly of the friendships they built, of the days spent with a shared love for plants and landscapes, and of the sense that the garden was a place not only for horticulture but for human connection. They recall the Christmas gatherings funded by the Trust and the small rituals that marked their weekly routine, from sharing cake to exchanging notes of encouragement as the seasons changed. The emotional toll of leaving is evident in conversations with those who remain, who say they miss the garden’s beauty and worry about its health as maintenance gaps widen.

For now, visitors to Mottistone will encounter a landscape that still carries beauty, even as it reflects a period of transition. The top meadow—quiet and breathtaking in memory—still sits at the heart of the estate, but the current state of the gardens around it tells a different story: a garden in need of care, and a volunteer base that seeks clarity and inclusion in a way that the National Trust has yet to provide. Whether the Trust will offer a detailed plan, re-engage the Friday Gang, or recruit a new generation of volunteers to restore the garden’s former glory remains to be seen. In the meantime, the Isle of Wight’s Mottistone garden endures as a symbol of a broader conversation about volunteer engagement, governance, and the future of heritage spaces that depend as much on people as on plants.