Tales from Titchmarsh

Appearances aren’t important when it comes to gardening, says Alan, what’s more significant is whether one has a feel for plants

Some time ago now, a very nice photographer came and took photos of my hands. I made sure they were garden fresh (with a suitably earthy patina), since the image was destined for a book in which a host of gardeners’ hands would be on view to the world. I wouldn’t want you to think that I had to dirty my digits especially, but if I had presented them newly scrubbed and with no soil under the fingernails – as my mother always instructed when I returned home from work as a lad – then my street cred would have plummeted.

I still have a letter sent by a farmer’s nine-year-old son to the BBC TV programme Nationwide back in the 1980s. I appeared every Friday as the gardening expert. The little nipper asked, “Why does Alan Titchmarsh always have clean hands and boots?” The answer was that he doesn’t; it’s just that old habits die hard, and I had become used to washing and putting on clean clothes whenever I went out, and that included to the television studio. I have since learned to wash thoroughly once the cameras have departed, and to retain my customary loamy encrustation when I am being filmed.

When I took over presenting Gardeners’ World from the late Geoff Hamilton, back in 1996, fresh from presenting the studio-based chat show Pebble Mill at One, the producer of the show looked me over with a worried frown on my first day’s filming. I enquired as to the reason for his anxiety. “Your jeans are too clean,” he said. I laughed and knelt down in the mud. Then I squeezed some John Innes potting compost between my fingers and asked if that was better. The frown turned into a smile and all was well from thereon in. In the television gardening world, grubbiness clearly implies authenticity, even if my own experiences have led me to suspect that this is not always the case.

Hands – especially when gardening – give a lot away.

I cherish the remark made by Laurie Lee in Cider with Rosie, where he describes his mother treating her plants in the same way as she treated her children, “with a kind of slap-dash love”. That sums it up for me. I can tell from the way someone handles plants whether they have a real feel for them, or whether those plants might just as well be lifeless and inert objects – a book or a piece of china – that transmit little in the way of personality to the person dealing with them.

It isn’t easy to describe this ability – it is a kind of ease, a comfortableness; love and care underscored with confidence as to just how much apparent rough handling a plant can take.

A good gardener can swiftly turn a healthy potted cyclamen upside down and balance it in the palm of his or her hand on the inverted arc of turgid foliage. A good gardener will pick up three or four pots of ferns or grasses ‘by the hair’ and move them to the required spot, with little or no damage. That same gardener will know that if the same treatment were meted out to a bleeding heart plant, the results would be disastrous. Knowledge is helpful, yes, but gardening and growing things requires more than that – it also relies on instinct.

I love watching dexterity in all its forms – whether it be the craft of a thatcher, a potter, a surgeon or a chef. There is something confidenceinspiring about observing someone who can handle a brush, a knife or a whisk with innate ease, an ease born of… what exactly? Experience, undoubtedly, but more than anything it boils down to aptitude, defined by the dictionary as ‘natural ability’. The key word there is ‘natural’. Innate. Not acquired.

When I am asked, as happens quite often, “Why can’t I grow… somethingor-other?” I explain what the plant needs – sun or shade, good drainage or damp earth, acid or alkaline conditions – and my interlocutor replies, “But I’ve done all that”, then I confess I am at a loss to explain to them why their plant will not thrive. “Plants want to grow,” I explain. “It’s up to us not to get in the way.”

It doesn’t cut any ice, of course, and my inquisitor will usually smile weakly and drift off to find someone else to talk to. Funny thing gardening, isn’t it?

It isn’t easy to describe this ability – it is a comfortable kind of ease; love and care underscored with confidence as to just how much apparent rough handling a plant can take