Department: Plant Centre
Advisory
Today I worked with the Advisory Team, which is an amazing service that the RHS offers to members and is a real nerve centre of the society. Members can ask any horticultural related question and these will be answered by very knowledgeable people including specialists & scientists in pathology, botany and entomology. A system called iAMT is used to log all member enquiries, so historical records can be found of what members ask, the number of enquiries dealt with and to help keep track of what needs to be responded too. The team also produces articles for The Garden, The Lady, The Daily Telegraph and other specialist publications, do the plant profiles and gardening advice on the website and now have to respond to 'comments' on these pages' as well as contributing to the RHS Facebook page.
They have several offices, where I was Anne Adam was one of first point of contact people, where all postal and email enquiries come to first, she would then expertly sift through it all and know what to hand out to whom to answer. She herself was also a fount of knowledge and could answer many questions herself, including deciphering from blurry photos what the problem could be (the use of iPads has meant worse photos than ever). Then there is a office where phone calls are dealt with and they have what they call the MAC which is a physical presence in the Plant Centre, where members can speak to someone in person about their gardening queries.
This is the quiet period and this entails an average of 50 emails per day (100 when it's busy in summer). They do disease forecasts - what they might be expecting to come up for the season. Dealing with queries can be a sensitive issue - you can't say for sure that something is something - only that it appears to be something. You can't condone certain use of chemicals (e.g. milk and Jeyes fluid - commonly used for all sorts of ailments) because it opens up too much of a can of worms.
I spent my time learning about the iAMT system - how to log in queries and to answer them, distributing to the right people. Sitting at the Advisory desk in the Plant Centre, learning about the most common queries (questions re lawns, fruit and veg come up alot). There has been a run of Box Blight samples being sent in or handed in caused by the Cylindrocladium buxicola or Volutella buxi. Most of the samples had both. Both causes the leaves to brown and fall off. If it only had P. buxi then there is a chance that given the right environment and cutting off infected leaves - it could grow out of it. But if it has C. buxicola which appears like black lesions on the stems, then nothing can be done about it. The fungi can stay in the ground up to 6 years. We looked at these under the microscope - V. buxi appears as pink spores on the underside of the leaves, the other is like it's names sake and is like a group of cylinders. There are no chemicals available for the amateur gardener to treat these.