{"id":3131,"date":"2009-11-11T21:02:13","date_gmt":"2009-11-11T21:02:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gardenvisit.com\/blog\/?p=3131"},"modified":"2009-11-11T21:02:13","modified_gmt":"2009-11-11T21:02:13","slug":"cothay-manor-garden","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.gardenvisit.com\/blog\/cothay-manor-garden\/","title":{"rendered":"Cothay Manor Garden"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Channel 4, in the UK, did a programme on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gardenvisit.com\/garden\/cothay_manor_gardens\">Cothay Manor Garden<\/a> this evening. Mr Alastair Robb (78) and Mrs Mary-Anne  Robb (68) spend \u00a340,000\/year on running the house and only get \u00a315,000 from opening the garden to the public. Mrs Robb said, rightly, that &#8216;most National gardens have lost their soul&#8217; and that running the garden as the National Trust do would wreck its character. They have four children who say &#8216;we don&#8217;t want to spend every waking hour working, as you do&#8217;. But the parents gave the property to one of the children, to &#8216;keep it in the family&#8217; and preserve their life&#8217;s work. Not all the other children were happy with this, understandably.\u00a0 Ruth, for Channel 4, suggests the solution re the income is to organize events (like sculpture exhibitions) to attract more visitors and make more money. I saw this tried in several gardens last summer, including Chatsworth, Hatfield House and Mellerstain, and thought the sculpture and the gardens did nothing for each other (or for the\u00a0 income at Cathay). Ruth also persuaded them to build a cafe-restaurant, which made the Robbs their first ever profit, with visitor numbers up from 5,000 to 15,000. Giving the property to one child, hopefully 7 years before the parents&#8217; death, saves \u00a31m in inheritance tax on a \u00a33m property. Interesting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Channel 4, in the UK, did a programme on Cothay Manor Garden this evening. Mr Alastair Robb (78) and Mrs Mary-Anne Robb (68) spend \u00a340,000\/year on running the house and only get \u00a315,000 from opening the garden to the public. Mrs Robb said, rightly, that &#8216;most National gardens have lost their soul&#8217; and that running [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gardenvisit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3131"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gardenvisit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gardenvisit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardenvisit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardenvisit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3131"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardenvisit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3131\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gardenvisit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardenvisit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardenvisit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}