The fine art of asparagus

This requires cramming in as much as humanly possible. So within half an hour of shaking my hand, he’s managed to answer a few questions, taken umpteen phone calls, chatted to customers, checked his crops, sold a few punnets of asparagus and waved a couple round his gallery. All the while, his butterfly brain flits from his next job to devising his contraptions.

Richard is the proud inventor of a superb ride-on asparagus picker that is steered with foot pedals, pipes Radio 4 through his ear phones and allows him to manually cut his crop without straining his back. His unique bin in the farmhouse kitchen is also much admired. It’s black, plastic and capacious with a wooden lid operated via pulley system attached to a foot pedal. It can’t compete with Brabantia in the looks department but makes up for that in practicality.

“I’m very pleased with it though friends laugh when they see it. You can fit a full black bin bag in there,” says Richard, who has been nicknamed Caractacus Potts by one employee.

He admits that he has never seen Mr Potts in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang but there’s not much time for telly at Wharfedale Grange, near Harewood. Richard, 62, starts work at 7am on the family farm then washes the soil off his hands ready for a 6pm – 9pm shift in his studio and after that maybe a stint in the kitchen making dinner.

The 220-acre farm been in his family since the 1930s and apart from a few years travelling the world, he has worked there most of his life growing asparagus and pick your own fruits and supplying salad to top chefs.

He started painting as a child and though he had no formal training, he had the encouragement of his grandmother, also an artist, and his late mother, Jane, an art lover. His colourful, vibrant work is sought-after and he is successful enough to rely on it financially, though the thought of giving up farming fills him with horror. The day job, he says, allows him freedom of artistic expression.

“If I had to paint for a living I might just paint work that sold, whereas now I am free to paint whatever I want. I’m free to take a risk with it,” he says. His studio and gallery is in a converted farm building next to the house and it was something a death trap until he and his partner Claire Thomas decided to take part in the North Yorkshire Open Studios event, where artists and makers open their workplaces to the public. “You had to climb a ladder and then up a few milk crates to get to it, after which you had to jump over for the holes in the floor. It didn’t pass the risk assessment,” says Claire.

The resourceful pair repaired the floor, taught themselves rudimentary plastering and found a discarded fire escape that now provides safe access. The bleached beams are courtesy of the previous occupants, chickens whose poo produced enough ammonia to strip the wood. Claire and Richard also extended the area, creating a new first floor from a double-height shed used to store cabbages.

“We literally got a couple of trees from Dalby Forest and made the joists ourselves,” says Richard. Interior designer Claire, another impressive multi-tasker and mum to Oscar, 10, helps style and stock the shop at Stockeld Park, near Wetherby, for its Christmas Adventure and from May to July she opens the Potting Shed at Wharfedale Grange, selling flowers and garden-ware. While Richard paints in the evening, she does all his art admin. Her own design talents are on show in the house, which she and Oscar share with Richard and his father Malcolm. What was Malcolm’s workspace complete with tools and a vice is now beautiful sitting room featuring her favourite Designers Guild fabric and a fireplace they uncovered while renovating.

“It was in a bit of a state so we had to pull the plaster off and have that re-done and there was a bit where the window seat is now where Malcolm used to have a row of pot plants. He had them there because when it rained through the ceiling, they got watered,” says Claire, who likes to shop on the Rockett St George website, in the Anthropologie store in London and on eBay. She sourced her mirrored overmantle from the auction website and it makes a great headboard. The walls are decorated with Richard’s work, including his Yorkshire landscapes and cityscapes committed to memory after trips to London for exhibitions. He is prolific though his pace was slowed recently by bowel cancer that as spotted at a routine screening.

He was given a three per cent chance of survival and 18 months to live but insisted on six rounds of chemotherapy which shrank the tumour, making it operable. Claire says: “It’s slowed him down a bit. He used to have five hours sleep and now he needs seven but it’s incredible he survived at all. He just carried on as upbeat and positive as ever. In fact, we had a D Day, Death Day party in December on the day he was supposed to have died,” revealing that they have another reason to rejoice.

Richard is to be included in the latest Who’s Who of Contemporary British Art and he is probably the only asparagus farmer with that claim to fame.

www.richardsnowden.co.uk; www.wharfedalegrange.co.uk. Open today, tomorrow and June 16 for North Yorkshire Open Studios event. www.nyos.org.uk