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Dedicated hospital gardener Ralph Howe was honoured on June 28 for an amazing 60 years of service to Kettering General Hospital.

He was presented with a long service award to mark his extraordinary achievement – which also makes him one of the NHS’s longest serving employees.

Ralph, 77, joined the hospital as a gardener aged 17 in 1959 and has been working here ever since.

He was presented with his award in the hospital’s Prince William Education Centre alongside some of the 43 other hospital staff with more than 30 years of service.

Ralph, from Kettering, said: “I feel very honoured and lucky to have a job I love which has helped to keep me in pretty good health for all these years.

“I really enjoy planting flowers and shrubs and then maintaining them for all of our staff and patients to see.

“At the end of every week, I can always look back and have the satisfaction of knowing that I have made a difference to the hospital environment.

“I also love working outside – whatever the weather - and find the whole thing very rewarding.”

Ralph first started gardening with his father when he was about ten years old in his garden and allotment in Woodford.

While at Thrapston Secondary Modern School in 1955 he won the prize for the best allotment plot.

When he left school in 1956 he worked on a farm briefly but the dust irritated his asthma and a relative suggested that there was job opening up at the hospital.

He was interviewed by KGH’s head gardener, Percy Chester, and Group Secretary, Mr Dowgill, for the job and started work on May 25, 1959.

He said: “When I first started there were four of us and as well as maintaining all the flower and shrub beds and cutting the lawns we also had a huge vegetable field which provided all of the fresh vegetables for the hospital patients and staff.

“In those days we would pick the vegetables to order in the morning and deliver them in baskets on the wheelbarrows to the kitchen – where they would be on the patient’s plate at lunchtime.

“At that time we grew all of our own vegetables and had our own orchards for fruit.”

But times changed in 1961 when the hospital rapidly expanded with new wards and departments and the vegetable plots were discontinued.

Since then Ralph has worked as part of a team of groundskeepers at the hospital planting flowers, cutting hedges and lawns, and looking after trees on the hospital’s 33-acre site.

He received the MBE for his services to the hospital in 1997 and on July 5 last year – on the NHS’s 70^th birthday – Ralph was honoured by the hospital with a park bench and cherry tree in the hospital’s Pocket Park.

Kettering General Hospital’s Director of Facilities and Estates, Ian Allen, said: “Ralph does an amazing job helping us to keep the hospital’s grounds at a very high standard.

“Looking after our lawns, flower beds, hedges and shrubberies is a never-ending task and it involves countless hours of work in every month of the year.

“We have been extremely lucky to have someone as dedicated as Ralph who has taken such pride in his work over such a long period and helped us to shape the grounds we have today - grounds which are very much enjoyed by our staff, patients and visitors.”

The Trust also presented awards to some of its 43 of its staff with long service certificates for serving the NHS for more than 30 years each.

In fact these staff have a combined total of 1,465 years of service between them – an average of 34 years each.

Director of Human Resources and Organisational Development, Mark Smith, said: “We are very fortunate as an organisation to attract people who often devote their entire working lives to looking after local people.

“They provide care in various roles within our Trust to ensure that our patients services run smoothly and they are a credit to our National Health Service.

“We think it is important that we recognise the immense contribution our long serving staff make to our organisation – and to the local community we serve - through these awards.

“I want to thank them all for what they do – and have done – for us for so many years.”