Personality profile
GARDENING – It’s the circle of life that I love
Dawn Kingsford grabbed some “off-air” time with BBC garden show host Andy Garland ahead of the start of the show’s busiest season...
Few of us share our Sunday morning with a bacon butty and an audience of 70,000 people – but it’s all in a day’s work for Radio Kent’s Andy Garland.
Along with his garden gurus, Jean
Griffin and Steve Bradley, he has been in the horticultural hot seat answering our questions from 8am every Sunday for the last 10 years.
While he has been a part of the Radio
Kent team for nearly 21 years, during which time he has hosted every slot from Breakfast to Drive Time, he confesses that at just 45 he is one of the “old hands” at the station and delights in having propagated many a new talent.
In fact it’s his second stint hosting the
station’s most-listened-to garden show, having taken the helm for two years in the 1990s, when, he remembers, his first show was shelved, owing to the death of Princess Diana.
He took the programme on as a
complete garden novice, but like many newcomers he has been hooked by horticulture and has just completed two RHS-accredited training courses at Hadlow College.
It’s a far cry from his childhood in Plymouth, where he was the youngest by far of four children, with a love of the coast. His father, who died of a heart attack when Andy was eight, was in the Navy, and his uncles beguiled him with war-time tales. However, a term with Radio Devon’s youth posse was enough to turn his fancy from the sea to the airwaves.
He remembers: “It was one Sunday night and the red light was on and we were playing some great records and I realised that it made me feel so happy and energised. It was an epiphany for me.”
And it is a feeling that has endured – Mid Kent Living 7
in spite of his much-loved mum, Ruth, asking if he’s ever going to get a proper job.
That awakening was enough for him
to make the move to Kent to study radio, film and TV with sports science at Christ Church College, where he earned a first class BA (hons). He remembers arriving in Canterbury and seeing the
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