Blooming success:

host Alan Gardner reveals how his autism gives him a unique viewpoint when it comes to garden design. Kerry Harvey reports.

Autistic garden designer’s flourishing business.

With his pink hair and matching manicure, Alan Gardner is just as colourful as the high-end gardens he designs in his Living Channel series The Autistic Gardener.

“It started out with a little bit of purple and then got slightly out of control,” he says, adding he sought the advice of wife Mandy in the early days of his transformation.

“I can’t blame being autistic for it, but I don’t think there is anything in my brain that goes, ‘What will people think?’ If everybody was on that sort of level, it would be truly amazing wouldn’t it? I don’t care what people think and as long as I am not hurting others, it isn’t a problem, is it?”

No problem at all, but acceptance has been a long time coming for the 57-year-old gardening expert who admits to being bullied throughout his school days.

“I was very excited about leaving school,” he says, with the same refreshing frankness he answers all questions.

“I came up with a theory – I have never seen it written down but it appears to be true – that we tend to be light switches so there is no grey area in the middle.

“I either go for something full on or I have no interest in that thing whatsoever. When it comes to new experiences and taking on new things, which a lot of autistic people don’t like, I embrace them.”

Gardner discovered a love of

gardening – more particularly growing things – as a teen and turned it into a career.

“I was more the person that went to put the lawn down and put the plants in,” he says of his early days working for the Birmingham Parks Department.

However, his unique ability to see patterns and shapes where the rest of us don’t soon kicked in.

“I can recognise car number plates but I don’t know the numbers; it’s the pattern they make. When you realise it is pattern you see everywhere, that’s then what you respond to and it makes life quite interesting,” he adds.

Gardner has gone on to create 40 Royal Horticultural Society gardens and won awards at Chelsea, Hampton Court and Tatton Park.

Clients now regularly entrust him with budgets between £30,000 and £100,000 and he has more work than he can handle.

“I’m in a position now where my clients are not people who are looking for a garden designer. My clients are people who want me to design their garden and it has been like that for a number of years,” he says, without an ounce of conceit.

“Gardens and landscapes are very important. You do a garden or a landscape for a private client and you change their life to a degree. It’s something they see outside their window every morning when they get up. It’s something they sit out in during the day. It’s something they see in the night when they come home. It’s making the world a nicer place, a better place, somewhere more visually stimulating.”

The first series of The Autistic Gardener introduced him to the world at large. In this second season, he spreads his wings and heads to the United States to work his magic on gardens in three different states.

Gardner says there is no way he would have contemplated the trip on his own, adding that arriving in New York City put him in a ‘little bit of a spin’. “The lorries and cars didn’t look the same, people didn’t quite talk the same. It was different to England,” he says.

“Two people came with me. They got a car to take me to Heathrow, we got on the plane, I sat where I was told, I got off at the end and got into a taxi to be taken to a hotel I had no idea where.

“Even though I was older than the two of them, I was the 10 year old that had gone on holiday. I took no money whatsoever. I didn’t have a single dollar on me.

“I insisted that the production company buy me some souvenirs. My kids only wanted sweets so that’s what they got.”

His reactions to the new environment are part of the show.

“We talk about my difficulty with food and diet in an American diner in New York. We talk about sensory overload in Times Square,” he says.

“We actually go to the places that cause these problems and we drop these little things in, like little parachutes, so people are watching a garden makeover series but we are also educating them about Asperger’s as we go through.”

“I don’t care what people think and as long as I am not hurting others, it isn’t a problem, is it?” – Alan Gardner