Fears over pace of National Trust closure of Argyll’s Arduaine Gardens

With the National Trust for Scotland (NTS) remaining resolutely  silent and unresponsive to calls for answers from the media, local rumours are running high in Argyll over the details of the planned closure of Arduaine Garden.

Staff were informed of the decision in parallel with the release of information to the Press, giving them no chance to absorb the personal and professional impact on their lives before everyone else got the news.

When the planned closure was made public, it was assumed that Arduaine would see out the coming season before closing – largely because this would be a logical business perspective.

However it is now thought that the Garden is to close in around seven weeks time.

Maurice Wilkins, who leads the team at Arduaine, currently running its Snowdrop Festival, has worked there for around 25 years and lives in a tied house in the Gardens. The impact on all aspects of his life must be utterly disorientating and unnerving.

As For Argyll has reported, the sceptical view is that the new regime at NTS was already planning the status chage to the eleven properties concerned, as part of its restructure-to-survive strategy and used the cover of the recessionto do it now.

Whether or not this is the case – and its plausibility is supported by the time plans of this nature would take to produce – the NTS have handled the annoucement very badly.

NTS management thinking does not seem to have embraced the different consequences of closing a property and a garden. A property to be completely closed can be mothballed. A garden can not. In the case of Arduaine, the qustions to be asked involve first the situatiuon of the staff and then the position of the garden itself.

• Will Mr Wilkins be given adequate time to arrange to leave his tied house?
• Will all staff at Arduaine Garden be offered the opportunity to transfer to other NTS gardens?
• Will the garden revert to another ownership? And, if so, to whose ownership?
• Will it be sold? And if so in what timescale?

Should the Garden be sold, this would seem an obvious candidate for an energetic community buy out. The expertise to run the garden is there already. With the renowned and wonderfully located Loch Melfort Hotel next door, the conjunction of the two could be very profitably developed and marketed.

Every crisis is an opportunity.