Forty years on

Sep 1 2007

by Hannah Stephenson, The Journal

Gardeners’ World is celebrating its 40th year. Hannah Stephenson looks back on the programme and its personalities. IT STARTED as a seed of an idea when colour TV was coming in and gardening was considered a fantastic medium for it – and has gone on to produce vast harvests of information for gardeners worldwide. Now, Gardeners’ World is celebrating its 40th year with an hour-long special on BBC Two on August 31 which reflects how trends have changed over the years, from formal bedding of the 60s and 70s to the present wave of naturalistic planting and wildlife-friendly spaces. The first programme was filmed using guest gardens with Percy Thrower and broadcast on January 5, 1968. The following year, he began using his own garden, Magnolias, in Shrewsbury, for the series. The style of gardens and a variety of trends have come and gone during those decades. Story continues ADVERTISEMENT “In the 60s, people had perfectly manicured lawns, rock gardens and formal beds. Now we’ve gone for more naturalistic planting,” says Gardeners’ World series producer Rosemary Edwards. Percy Thrower was already an established name and presented The Gardening Club, the first gardening series ever produced by the BBC which made him a celebrity. It was studio-based and the BBC decided to expand on that. “It coincided with the fact that colour was introduced and that gardening would be a good medium in colour and would lend itself to being based outside,” says Edwards. Magnolias became the first of five of the show’s anchor gardens. It was Thrower’s own personal garden in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, where he had a retirement bungalow. He and his wife, Connie, lived there all the time while filming was going on. He had come from being a parks superintendent, so organised bedding schemes were prominent and fruit and veg were non-existent. In 1976, Thrower broke the BBC ‘No advertising’ policy and was fired for endorsing fertilisers on TV. His co-presenter Arthur Billitt took the helm at his own home, Clack’s Farm, in Worcestershire. Large beds with straight rows of vegetables represented Billitt’s practical style, as he transformed the 2.5-acre garden into an allotment and national showpiece. Geoff Hamilton was already tending a plot (now known as ‘The Original Barnsdale’) when he joined the Gardeners’ World team in 1979. As the show progressed, more space was needed to experiment and in 1984 he moved a mile up the road to Barnsdale in Rutland. A Victorian farmhouse with more than five acres of land, most of it pastures, creating the new garden was a real project. “The big change was when Geoff Hamilton took over,” Edwards says. “Until then Percy, Arthur and others were very much teachers who instructed and told you how to do it. The tone was very much ‘This is what you need to do’. “Geoff became far more the man next door. The way he showed people how to garden was very much by trial and error. He had a lot of experience and he would share information but didn’t dictate to the viewers. “He was the first person on Gardeners’ World to begin to garden organically. In the first programmes, he was spraying away but then he became more concerned about the environment and was the first person to carry out an experiment not to spray and whether it was still possible to grow beautiful roses.” Ornamental grasses planted among a rich colour palette of perennials truly reflects Alan Titchmarsh’s trend-setting style at Barleywood, again his own home. When he started to do Ground Force for BBC One, it attracted an audience who weren’t passionate gardeners, people who bought plants from garden centres but didn’t grow them from seed. “There were people who watched Ground Force who would then tune into Gardeners’ World because they wanted to know how to maintain the garden,” says Edwards. Today, filming is done at Berryfields in the Midlands, a two-acre private garden with a range of borders, shrubs and trees as well as two ponds and a large vegetable patch. And Gardeners’ World of the future? “The main thrust is how our gardens are going to be affected by the ravages of climate change,” says Edwards.

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