05 / NURSERY
BARRY LUPTON INTERVIEWS JOHN MURPHY
GAMBLE AND GROW
Barry Lupton interviews one of Ireland’s best known and respected nursery owners, John Murphy of Annaveigh Plants B. What motivated you to pursue a career in horticulture? J. I grew up in the 70s, was a bit of a hippie and developed a great interest in self sufficiency. I was growing vegetables in our garden in Dublin and it went on from that. Also, my father was big into gardening and was an avid gardener and it shows in that three of the four children ended up in horticulture or agriculture careers.
B. Looking back at your experiences, which ones stand out as being the most significant in terms of influencing the direction you took? J. Meeting Grainne in UCD was probably the most significant. Being unable to support ourselves doing our Masters Degrees in Horticulture made us travel to work in German nurseries, where we learned our basic skills of budding and grafting trees. Paddy Gleeson put us in touch with Chris Byrne who was starting Coilog Nurseries. He gave us our first break in Ireland and free reign to show what we could do. Later, when working for SAP, I learned how to trade plants and discovered a wide range of producers throughout Europe, with whom I still trade.
B. What are the most rewarding aspects of your work? J. I find working with landscape contractors and architects who take quality seriously rewarding. Also, being able to see the finished product develop into maturity is great. Loading trees for export to some of the most quality conscious nurseries in Germany and the UK is very satisfying. Having these nurseries buy trees from Annaveigh is a credit to our staff as the nurseries
20
in question only buy the best product possible to grow on into mature specimens. Another aspect of my work I particularly like is cutting the grass between the rows of trees. There is nothing like spending a weekend day driving the tractor and seeing the trees individually and watching their progress, or lack of!
B. Besides remuneration, what aspects of your job would you most like to change? J. When you enter a career like this you are attracted to working with the trees, but as time has gone by my work has been with a computer and the phone. I would like to be working outside again.
B. What do you see as the primary strengths of Ireland’s amenity production sector? J. We have plenty of land and wages are not that high compared to the rest of the production countries in Europe, so we should be able to build a good export market. The problems have always been the lack of investment in improved facilities and growers not wanting to take the gamble.
B. What were the key lessons you took from the impact of the economic crash on your business? J. That our credit control was not tight enough. Nowadays we don’t sell unless we’re sure of payment. We’ve either weeded out the bad payers or they have disappeared with our money.
B. How do you think relevant government bodies could better represent the interests of your business? J. Well as you know, recently we
HORTICULTURECONNECTED / www.horticulture.ie / April/May 2014
have been trying to get some compensation for the impact of ash dieback and we have met with a blank “NO” from the Minister of Horticulture. If it were farm livelihoods being threatened payment would have been forthcoming. Every other sector including the poultry growers has received some form of compensation over the past decade amounting to hundreds of millions - horticulture has had nothing and you should all remember this at the next election.
B. Following from that question, what do you think nurseries owners could be doing to better represent their interests? J. We need to form a single body which represents the interests of nurseries, landscape contractors, landscape architects and garden centres. Until we do this our lobbying power will always be useless.
B. Issues relating to plant specification – poor or incorrect species choice, substitutions, wrong sizes and lack of oversight and checking – have been the subject of much debate. In your opinion, what role if any should nursery operators play in ensuring specifications are met? J. It’s not our role to implement this; it’s the role of the landscape architect. The recent problems we have seen have been caused by a landscape architect only being employed up to the planning stage and leaving a situation where the building contractor has a free hand in what happens to the landscape. This is very prevalent in the schools building program, but even
