Fronds in high places

An obsession with palms has taken Martin Gibbons to some of the most inaccessible places around the world, says Tiffany Daneff, and to the founding of his remarkable nursery

- Tiffany Daneff

THERE was nothing in Martin Gibbons’s early life that gave the merest hint of the career that lay ahead. Yet, today, he lives in what was the old kitchen garden of Ham House, with his wife, Emma, a nurserywoman, and two teenage sons, named after plant hunters Jamie (Fortune) and Henry (Kingdon). Together with their home, the site houses The Palm Centre Mr Gibbons set up in the 1980s, where he cares for his National Collection of Trachycarpus palms, several of which he discovered and introduced.

The first clue came with his departure, six days after his 21st birthday, to Australia, paying £10 as part of the Assisted Passage scheme. As a ‘£10 Pom’, he worked his way through Australia doing seasonal work, selling saucepans door to door and completing a stint on the railways. For six months, he slept under canvas working with a surveyor in the heart of the Australian desert on a seismic survey prospecting for oil, then hitchhiked back to Europe via Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Myanmar. ‘Afghanistan was just another country then, with old guys walking round with flintlocks on their shoulders,’ he remembers. ‘I don’t remember spotting a single palm tree in all that time. Today, you’d see masses of them even before you leave Singapore airport.’