Ideas are tender little things – it is very easy to kill them off. Our western culture has evolved upon the principles of judgement not nurture so I’ve spent a large part of my career defending them.

When we set up the internal agency at Nationwide I would go round the wastepaper baskets and drag out any discarded roughs just to see what people had deemed unworthy to show anyone else. Quite often I would find myself uncrumpling them, adding comments and leaving it on their desk for them to find in the morning. A good few campaigns started that way.

In big organisations you find yourself developing ideas behind closed doors until they are ready to face the world so to speak but they can be shot to pieces on their first outing if you are not careful. I started to try and make people aware of this at presentations. I’d tell them about the principle of ‘slow death’ and then watch them try really hard to alter their behaviour. Gardens are special places where the rules of both nature and nurture apply. Nature provides the vigour, nurture, the beauty. And as any veg grower knows, gardens can be extremely productive. And I’d rather spend my time in garden than a factory.