MARKET GARDENER

Wairarapa Times-Age, 11 July 1938, Page 4

MARKET GARDENER

WIFE OF POLITICIAN. MONEY FROM VEGETABLES. To prove, in her own words, that “there is a lot of money to be made out of vegetable growing,” Mrs Courtauld, wife of Major Jack S. Courtauld, M.P., is giving up her Grosvenor Square home and going back to the land. “I am trying an interesting experiment to make our estate, Burton Park, Petworth, in Sussex, entirely self-supporting by growing flowers, fruit and vegetables to meet our own needs, and I hope to sell tons more,” she told a newspaper representative. Major Courtauld, M.P. for Chichester, and younger brother of Mr Samuel Courtauld, director of the silk firm, will give his wife as many of the 2000 acres at Burton Park as she requires for her project. “I have been marketing the estate produce for only three weeks,” said Mrs Courtauld, “but it is paying well, and I am sur the scheme will be a success.”

Mrs Courtauld got her first batch of customers through her visiting list. She posted a pamphlet to all her friends, and their response was encouraging.

She has two fully-trained girl gardeners, and will contract to supply private houses and embassies with flowers, fruit and vegetable hampers. Every kind of vegetable in season can be supplied—peas, all greens, seakale or asparagus. All produce is freshly gathered and delivered direct from Petworth to London—so miles away—by motorvan within two or three hours.

“I find gardening so absorbing that I am giving up my Grosvenor Square house and settling permanently at Burton Park to supervise the marketing,’ Mrs Courtauld explained. Every year Mrs Courtauld subscribes to an expedition to some remote part of the world to procure rare plants. She has a fine collection of rhododendrons from Tibet, which are flourishing in the Sussex air.l Mountain plants from the Canadian Rockies are spreading rapidly.