It is a familiar story, but one that is always worth retelling. One day in 1968, as she was working in her alpine nursery at Waterperry School of Horticulture, Valerie Finnis heard a visitor identifying one of her plants as Gillenia trifoliata. She told him that he was the first person to recognise the plant. One thing led to another, and two years later they were married. Sir David Scott, for it was he, told her initially that he lived 'in a semi-detached house near Kettering'; it proved to be The Dower House at Boughton House, and it became asclosely identified with Finnis in the second half of her career as Waterperry had been in the first.
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