Titchmarsh Reveals his Private Garden
By Hannah Stephenson
Gardening guru Alan Titchmarsh gives readers a tour of his own private plot in his horticultural memoir, ‘My Secret Garden’ - plus, find out what else needs doing in the garden this week.
HIS old back garden at Barleywood was shared with millions of viewers every week when he was the frontman on BBC Gardeners’ World - but it’s taken 10 years for Alan Titchmarsh to finally reveal his current garden to fans. A decade after moving a stone’s
throw from Barleywood to his current Hampshire home, a large Georgian farmhouse set in four acres, he finally feels ready to let the public see how he has transformed the garden, through the pages of his new book, ‘My Secret Garden’. “It’s difficult when you’ve done a garden like this to keep it to yourself,” Titchmarsh reflects. “I didn’t want to open it up and have the pressure of folk coming in but people kept saying, ‘Do you bother with your garden now it’s not on the telly?’ Well, this is proof that I do.” Years of hard labour have gone into
achieving his private paradise, which features a mass of decorative borders, a wildflower meadow, a hornbeam avenue and a wildlife pond, and these days he just has two people to help him. Between them, they also maintain the 35 acres of meadow and woodland which Titchmarsh retained after selling Barleywood, which he turned into a nature reserve. “I’ll never let the TV cameras into my private garden,” he says now. “I would never go to Alison (his wife) and say, ‘Look, can we just do one programme?’ because we made the decision not to. I’m blissfully happy being there on my own with the family.” It’s amazing that he can fit any
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PA Photo/BBC Books
gardening into his hectic work schedule of TV presenting and writing.
“I have to,” he shrugs. “If I don’t go out there and potter several times a week, I get ratty. There’s quite a bit of mowing to do but I like the therapy of mowing. When I grew up my mum and dad had a tiny back garden up in Yorkshire and then when I first got married and lived in Berkshire we had a 15ft by 40ft strip behind the
house. So I know how lucky I am in having more space.”
Titchmarsh describes himself as a gardener who designs a bit, rather than a garden designer. “I trained in a parks department and the legacy of that is a liking for striped lawns and trimmed edges. I do have a bit of an obsession with neatness, if I’m honest, and that manifests itself in my preference for balance and symmetry, but within the order I enjoy a degree
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