‘Over the generations, they’ve lost the ability to feel for nature’
Alan Titchmarsh tells Georgia Humphreys about his new show, Spring Into Summer
There is one thing you can be sure of following an interview with Alan Titchmarsh. The much-loved gardener, presenter and novelist, who turns 72 in May, will not be leaving his career behind any time soon.
“People say, ‘Why don’t you retire? And you say, ‘Well, if I retire, I’ll have to find something to fill the time’,” quips the Ikley-born star, on a video call from his study in the attic of a barn, and he moves his camera to show the stunning views out over his garden.
“I could drive a minibus for people – but perhaps I’m better off doing what I do. Just maybe just a little bit less of it.”
But, while he says he’ll never give up work entirely, he muses: “I like to think I know when to stop doing something.
“I did seven years of Gardeners’ World, six years of Ground Force, 10 years of Pebble Mill At One, seven years of the chat show (The Alan Titchmarsh Show); I like to think I go, ‘I’ll park that one now’ before people go, ‘Oh, get him off!’”
Following the success of Love Your Weekend With Alan Titchmarsh, which started last year, ITV is now launching a brand-new primetime show.
The nine-part series, set in the heart of Hampshire, where Titchmarsh lives in a Grade Ii-listed Georgian farmhouse, will cover farming and animal life and where and when to plant for the coming year.
Each week there a celebrity guest will join him for planting, nature features and food tastings.
It is airing at a great time; warmer months are coming, and everyone has realised, after being in lockdown, just how important fresh air for “keeping us sane”.
Many people have also realised the huge benefits of gardening on our wellbeing, which Titchmarsh sums up perfectly, noting how nurturing and caring for plants is “good for the soul and the spirit”.
“The technological revolution has covered it up in a lot of people, it’s sort of submerged it, and people are very tech-savvy, which I’m not.
“Over the generations, they’ve lost the ability to feel for nature. With me, it’s very instinctive. I’m quite a primitive person, but I love that aspect of it – the feeling that I’m participating in it.
“Also, gardeners are the only interactive naturalists.
“A lot of naturalists are spectators, bird watching or whatever. But with us, we take cuttings, we sow seeds, we plant things, so we are involved, we are interacting with nature and encouraging it along, and it’s a wonderful feeling when it responds.”
Titchmarsh wants to stress that you don’t have to have a lot of land; you could just have a plant pot on your doorstep, for example.
“I don’t want to make it a chore or to be bullying or hectoring, but just to say, ‘Why don’t you have a go at this?’”
He campaigned long and hard during the first lockdown in spring of 2020 to get garden centres open, “and mercifully in the second lockdown, they stayed open.
“I can’t tell you how it felt for people who are in blocks of flats who have been told stay at home, ‘You’re allowed one walk a day’. “I don’t know whether I would have survived that, and I take my hat off to them for being able to.”
● Spring into Summer starts on STV tonight, 8pm