Today, the Royal Horticultural Society gardens at Hyde Hall, Rettendon, are some of the most lush,  and most visited, in eastern England, but in 1955 the site was a bleak, muddy pig-farm on top of a barren hill. 
In that year, Hyde Hall was acquired by Dick and Helen Robinson, who set about the Herculean task of turning the place into a lush garden. 
Not long afterward, in 1967, a boy was born in Rayleigh whose destiny was to become intricately tied up with Hyde Hall and the Robinsons. 
Andrew Lodge started to work casually at Hyde Hall as a teenager, and never went away. 
He says: “The Robinsons rather took me under their wing.” 
Man and boy, he has remained as much a feature of the hall as its famous rose garden. Only Andrew’s status is different. Today he is the garden manager. 
In 1993, the Robinsons passed Hyde Hall on to the RHS, but Andrew remained on site as a piece of living continuity. 
As a schoolboy at Sweyne School in Rayleigh, Andrew used to work for his uncle, who owned a landscaping business, during the summer holidays. 
Andrew says: “It made things clear in my mind. That was the work I wanted to do.” he says. 
As a teenager, Andrew says the “did not give Hyde Hall a thought – it was the world’s best kept secret at the time.” 
Then a mutual connection, a school governor, introduced the young gardening enthusiast to the Robinsons, and the garden path was set. Andrew took a City & Guilds qualification at Writtle College, but the most important lessons were not something he could learn in a classroom. 
Andrew says most of his working life has been a joy: “It is a pleasure to see the direct fruits of your labours, and how people enjoy them.” 
But even gardening has its bad experiences and he says: “I remember once when the fog came up and surrounded the hilltop for about two weeks. It was like being trapped inside four walls. At times like that, the weather does affect your spirits.” 
Even the Robinsons made mistakes, and Andrew learnt from these as well as their many triumphs. 
He says: “For instance, they tried to plant rhododendrons in the woodland garden.” 
But rhododendrons notoriously do not thrive in the heavy clay soils of Essex, and even the Robinsons could not make their planting scheme work. 
Andrew learnt the same lesson in reverse when he tried to plant roses in imported topsoil. 
“Roses just love Essex clays,” he says, “but they did not do well in the stuff we had brought in. Eventually we got rid of the new stuff and replaced it with some soil we scraped off one of the fields. The message, for any gardener, amateur or professional, is work with what you have got.” 
Today Andrew is involved with planning, development and education at Hyde Hall. 
He adds: “I don’t do anything on the hilltop any more. I leave that to the younger people.” 
Among these youngsters is 16-year-old Jonah Kirkwood, in his first year as a Hyde Hall apprentice. Jonah, the subject of next week’s Jobs profile, is learning from Andrew the things that Andrew learnt from the Robinsons.