These pages chart the progress of the project which is currently
IN ABEYANCE
January 2004
Angie Petkovic
Angie Petkovic lives in Cheltenham with her partner of 25 years Steve,
with their two children Victoria and Joshua.
Angie has been involved with Tourism for some 20 years both in PR
and Marketing and running her own hotel with Steve for 16 years.
Angie set up APT Marketing Solutions with the prime objective to provide
services to companies requiring straightforward solutions. Operating
as the in-house marketing department for companies is one of the services,
together with design, print, direct mail, branding, loyalty schemes
to name a few. APT offer Attraction Audits providing clear objective
insights to the current operation and strategies for improvement and
change. PR is major part of APT and Angie and her team recognise the
importance of media coverage and media relations.
Angie was on the Government Task Force for Sustainable Tourism and
in 2001 was responsible for managing the £3million grant-aid
to non-farming businesses affected by foot and mouth, in Gloucestershire.
The discovery of the garden at La Chaire is probably the most exciting
thing for Angie as the opportunity to be in at the beginning and bring
all her skills into operation is something very few people get the
chance to do.
Tony Russell
Tony Russell’s career with plants began in 1978 when he joined
the Forestry Commission in Snowdonia. In 1980 he went to Newton Rigg,
Cumbria to study forestry and horticulture and after qualifying in
1983 he took up post as Forester in the New Forest in Hampshire.
In 1989 he was appointed Head Forester of Westonbirt Arboretum in
Gloucestershire, one of the finest collections of tree and shrubs
in the temperate world. His areas of responsibility included conservation
of the many rare and endangered species within the collection and
interpretation of the collection and its environmental importance
to others.
He was also responsible for turning Westonbirt around from an attraction
with falling visitor numbers and a £600,000 per annum deficit.
By 1999 he had increased annual visitors from 100,000 to 300,000,
(making Westonbirt the third most visited garden in the UK after Kew
and the RHS Garden, Wisley) and turned the annual deficit into a healthy
surplus. In 2000, in recognition of these achievements, the Government
awarded Westonbirt, National Status.
Tony left Westonbirt in 2002 and is now widely recognised as one of
Britain’s leading authorities on trees and shrubs. Over the last
few years he has become a familiar face (and voice) on both TV and
radio, taking part in many horticultural and countryside programmes.
His six-part TV series ‘The Cotswold
Garden Trail’ was nominated for the
‘TV broadcast of the year’ at the National Garden Writers
Guild awards held at the Savoy, London in November 2002. He has co-presented
the gardening series ‘Roots and Shoots’
for HTV, and scripted and presented the successful major TV series
for Carlton on the Trees of Britain
which was screened during the summer of 2003. He is currently a panellist
on BBC Radio 4’s ‘Gardeners’
Question Time’ and is at present recording
a six-part radio series for BBC Radio 4 entitled ‘Plant
Invaders’ which will be broadcast in
March 2004.
Tony contributes regularly to the gardening press and has written
three books; ‘Westonbirt, A Celebration
of the Seasons’ published in 1995,
‘Cornwall’s Great Gardens’,
published in 1998 and ‘The World Encyclopedia
of Trees’ published in 2003. A fourth
book – ‘Great Gardens of the
Cotswold’s’ - is due for publication
in 2004. He is also editor of the annual publication ‘Gardens
to Visit’.
Tony is currently Horticultural Director of the La Chaire Sub-tropical
Gardens Restoration Project in Jersey in the Channel Islands.
Tony lives with his wife Rosemary and two young sons Charles and Howie
in an 18th century Cotswold stone cottage near the village of Avening
in Gloucestershire.
Derek Harris
Derek Harris trained at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London.
He has careers in architectural decoration, retailing and publishing,
with which he was able to combine photography.
His photographs have appeared world wide in books, magazines, calendars,
greeting cards, postcards and many other applications from advertising
promotions to record covers.
His unique vision and love of nature is clearly demonstrated in photography,
which he uses as his ‘medium of expression’.
Derek and his partner Judy live in Oakham near the very beautiful
area of Rutland Water in Leicestershire.
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All images on this site
are the property
of the photographer
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