HDRA/Garden Organic sells out

[alan refail]

How disappointing when people you put so much trust in appear to let you down!
I was just wondering this morning when the latest magazine from Garden Organic was due. Going to their website (members only pages) I discovered that they are handing over their commercial operations to Webbs Garden Centres. Needless to say there was a great deal of concern on the forum that members (of this charity) had not been consulted, or even directly informed, of this move.
I have supported HDRA (largely because of the R=Research) for many years. My worries started with the change of name to the totally ungrammatical, but "trendy", "Garden Organic", increased when the magazine was more and more dumbed down and Alan and Jackie Gear's successors seemed to concentrate on constant fund-raising to the expense of other things. Selling out to the commercial sector (with the attendant redundancy, I understand, of 90 staff is the last straw.
I will continue to garden "organically", though I might not use the word, but I doubt whether I will be a member of Garden Organic for much longer.
What do other forum members who belong to GO think?

[Shallot Man]

Alan
I to have had similar thoughts for some time now, in fact when my subscription is due in Feb, will be make up your mind time.

[Cider Boys]

Excuse my ignorance but I've always wondered who Henry Doubleday was perhaps someone could enlighten me?

I do remember his name cropping up when reading one of my favourites garden writers namely Lawrence Donegan Hills especially in his book Organic Gardening.

Barney

[Johnboy]

Hi Barney,
Henry Doubleday was a member of the family that used to be WHSmiths and Doubleday now just plain old W H Smiths. He was basically a stationer and imported Comfrey as a likely replacement for Gum Arabic but it wasn't fit for purpose and when Lawrence Hills was setting up his organization and with his experiments with Comfrey he thought it fitting to honour to person who introduced Russian Comfrey to the British Isles hence The Herny Doubleday Research Association.
I was proud to be a founder member and a friend to Lawrence and Cherry his wife.
JB.

[PLUMPUDDING]

That's really interesting Johnboy. I bought Lawrence Hills book many years ago and have been a member of the HDRA for years before it changed. I want to support the organic idea, but have also not been happy with recent developments. Do you think they are taking on more than they can fund, it does seem to be giving out bad vibes on the financial front.

Quite a few projects which have been swamped with funding and turned more into a theme park have totally lost their way and had to close when the funding has dried up. I hope "Garden Organic", horrible name, doesn't go the same way. I was thinking of the Earth Centre project which was a brilliant idea and extremely interesting that was ruined by an enormous Lottery Fund grant and closed a year or two later as visitor numbers weren't enough to maintain it. It was started at Connisborough on waste land from the mining industry and was ahead of its time in promoting green energy creation and saving, among all sorts of other environmental ideas. I still wear my gardening jacket - a fleece made from spun plastic pop bottles - and it must be 12 years old at least that I bought there when it first opened.

[Mike Vogel]

I'll probably maintain my mambership, although I didn't realise they had farmed out their commercial enterprise to Webbs. Maybe this is reciprocal, and Webbs are trying to diversify into the Organic market.

I like the research and the educational aspects of the organisation, especially their Heritage Seed library, which I would like to join some time soon. And the centre near Ryton is a lovely place to visit.