Category: Journalism, books, TV

Something very exciting/deeply terrifying is about to happen, in a garden kind of way, over the next couple of days. I can’t say what it is yet because I’m too busy a) panicking b) snipping and deadheading and c) secretly wondering if I could get away with buying a packet of runner beans from Sainsbury’s and tying them onto my runner bean wigwam with fishing line.

‘I’m too busy to eat!’ I shouted at D when she suggested that a 6-month pregnant woman who’s spent all day tying things in while standing on a chair should probably have lunch.

All will be clear by Monday afternoon (when I’ll be resting in a darkened room)…

Just goes to show – you slave away long enough building woodland enclosures for UKTV Gardens daytime and writing features for Kitchen Garden magazine in which you show how an electric drill can bring a whole new exciting spin to the kitchen (if I remember correctly, making holes in potatoes and stuffing them with carrots) and you get the new main presenting gig on Gardener’s World.

All you budding gardening presenters out there unafraid to bounce around in a red sweatshirt with the logo Garden Invasion (or some such) on it, to wax lyrical over a shower curtain as an exciting al fresco feature and to concoct over-exuberant pretend team rivalry with another presenter in a different brightly coloured sweatshirt, take heart!! You too could eventually be presiding over the Long Border.

Good luck, Toby, at least you’re not the BFG.

The Sunday Telegraph
May 2006

Much excitement at gardening school this week since we were asked to bring in a sample of our soil. We plopped our precious offerings on the table and then had to do chemistry tests on them with white powder and tiny spatulas.
It was all rather Groucho club toilets circa 1990. The fabulous news is that I seem to have great soil so well done me. Apparently it’s a light sandy loam which means it drains well, is easy to cultivate and warms up fast so you can plant vegetables in it before other people can. My poor neighbour, on the other hand, had a heavy, claggy clay-silt that just wouldn’t settle in his test tube and made the table shake when he heaved it out of his bag.We were all sympathetic. Secretly, though, I was feeling quite smug. Did I mention I had a light sandy loam?

If you don’t have a soil testing kit, then there’s a lower-tech way to discover what you’re standing on. Pick up a handful. If it won’t form a ball and feels gritty, it’s sandy; if you can form it into a thick cylinder but not a thread, it’s silty; if you can form it into a ring, then it’s a clay; if you can’t form it into any shape at all, it’s a patio.

Whatever you discover, add well-rotted manure. I’m sure it’s more technical than that but all advice seems to end with ‘add well-rotted manure’. In fact, if you ever want to sound like you know about gardening, just pepper every other sentence with this phrase and you can’t go wrong. The experts can’t seem to understand that most people don’t wander around with a mental map of the nearest defecating horse. Surely there’s a handy pile of dung at the end of your garden… in south London. No? Well buy a horse. Or move to
the country and then buy a horse.

There is, however, one thing in kitchen gardening even more covetable than a good soil – something that has vegetable growers weeping with jealousy. A heated greenhouse. Preferably Victorian, with liftable bits in the roof and an ancient grapevine curling above the door. If you have such a thing, I
envy you and I hate you. If you only have a lowly unheated structure (or, like me, an ineptly heated polytunnel) you’ll be familiar with the dread,
particularly at this time of year, of frosts which can lay waste to a row of baby plants faster than Alan Sugar can point his finger. Frost anxiety –
which causes constant visits to weather forecast websites and an obsessive attachment to horticultural fleece – can be almost debilitating. If – and obviously this has never happened to me – you’ve ever considered cancelling a long weeekend in the south of France for fear of leaving a dozen Gardeners Delight tomato seedlings to the elements, then you’re the sort of floundering idiot experienced gardeners would accuse of knowing nothing whatsoever about anything at all. If so, advise them to add some well-rotted manure.

Ah, to be in Chelsea when the show gardens are on show, the loos have no queues and, if you’re beady eyed, you can spot celebrities of the heady calibre of Christopher Biggins, Arabella Weir and Jimmy Nail. Actually, that’s not entirely fair – I did spot Michael Caine trying to hide in a voluminous Barbour and cap (a disguise rather scuppered by the fact he was standing next to his very recognisable wife Shakira), the fragrant Susan Hampshire, Michael Palin and the top of Ringo Starr’s head – though it could have been an Australian tree fern.

But press day is not about the slebs, it’s about the gardens and, on my perambulations, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that I have inadvertently created a very fashionable garden of my own here in Greenwich. What I thought was a problem – the fact that nothing is flowering – is, it seems, the very apex of horticultural savvy since pretty much all the show gardens this year are green. Green leaves, green flowers, just green. With maybe a white peony thrown in if you’re daring.

The Telegraph garden, Andy Sturgeon’s Cancer Research garden (pictured above) and the Reflective Garden were all stunning, but it was Daylesford Organic’s eccentric wheat field (complete with picturesque poppies and an artful scarecrow, naturally) and burgeoning  raised beds of vegetables (pictured below) that had me wanting to screech home, pull up my railway sleeper raised beds and take up an intensive course in willow weaving. In an arty twist on the old square foot vegetable gardening technique, they’ve gone for a grid of small rustic willow weaved beds, like baskets, filled with gorgeousness – wigwams of broad beans and tomatoes, clumps of flowering chives, structural artichokes, feathery purple fennel etc. Inspirational and aspirational – who knew you could say that about parsley? I suspect an army of 4x4s are screeching out of gravel drives in the Cotswolds in search of blood-veined sorrel as we speak.

Other highlights for the vegetable nerd (something I feel I am in good company over since I stood next to Nigel Slater who, for some minutes, was actually jotting down notes while standing in front of a wigwam of Mini Gem squash): Thompson & Morgan and W Robinson & Son’s displays in the Grand Pavilion.

Ghastly people alert: Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen and his wife screeching ‘You’ve got to go to the Green Room darling, the GREEN ROOM,’ at everyone they met.

Most disappointing show garden award: Diarmuid Gavin’s tedious box ball and allium cafe terrace beneath a swarm of flower umbrellas. Same old, same old.

Surprising Titchmarsh in-the-flesh fact: how much makeup are they making that man wear on camera? The poor man looks like he should be in vaudeville.