Gardener's question time

Lynn Barber on why Alan Titchmarsh grows on you

Alan Titchmarsh is a sex god. Deep breath. Try again. Alan Titchmarsh is a sex god. Titchmarsh. Alan. Sex. God. Is... Nope. It's no good - I still can't make that leap of faith. But for all I know there might be women who believe Robin Cook is a sex god. Anyway, we have proof that Alan Titchmarsh is an SG because he says so himself and he is a far too nice a man to lie.

Just the other day, on Ground Force, he announced, 'I'll have you know I'm the sexiest man on telly after George Clooney.' He didn't actually explain the basis for this statement because he was too busy toshing up a topiary peacock at the time, but I asked him afterwards, and he said it was from some television survey quoted in The Daily Telegraph. Elle magazine put him in a list of top 20 gorgeous hunks and Woman's Own included him in a feature on 'hidden heart-throbs'. Two years ago he was mobbed by women at a Gardeners' World live show in Birmingham - and not all old biddies either. So there you go. Alan Titchmarsh is a sex god.

And he has now written not one, not two, but three novels in which quiet manly heroes stroll through life to a chorus of long-limbed lovelies going 'phwoar! Look at that sex god with the secateurs!' The eponymous hero of his first novel, Mr MacGregor, was 'a man whose looks and build would have been perfectly at home modelling rugged outdoor wear in a Racing Green catalogue.' See? Total sex god. The girls in his new novel, Animal Instincts, keep asking each other about the hero - 'Dishy?' 'Unbelievably.' 'Hunky?' 'You bet.' When one of them finally gets him in the hay, she looks at his 'broad chest, strong legs and muscular arms' and whispers, 'You're so beautiful.'

I wouldn't actually call Alan Titchmarsh beautiful, but he is catalogue-handsome like his heroes, albeit several inches shorter. And he has proper man-of-the-soil blisters on his hands, which, he says, he acquired yesterday shifting six tonnes of topsoil in a howling gale for Ground Force. He reckons it's Ground Force that has made him a sex god - that and his novels, which show his sensitive side. But it was odd for it to happen so late in life (he is 51) because when he was younger no one fancied him. He thinks perhaps he's got sexier as he's got older, or at least more comfortable in himself. While we were having lunch in a restaurant in Kensington, two fans spotted him through the window and waved at him. One was a little boy - 'You see!' he said, 'even children watch Ground Force !' - the other was a smartly dressed middle-aged woman who kept tapping on the window and blowing kisses till I thought she was demented, but she turned out to be Anne Robinson.

I reminded him that we'd met once before at the Literary Review Bad Sex awards, but this was not a very tactful subject to bring up. He won for a passage in Mr MacGregor: 'She planted moist, hot kisses all over his body. Beads of sweat began to appear on Guy's forehead as he became more entangled in the lissom limbs of this human boa constrictor. For fully 15 minutes their mutual passion heightened, with groans, sighs and liquid noises.'

Titchmarsh didn't actually win, he reminds me - Sebastian Faulks did for Charlotte Gray - but Faulks chickened out of coming to the prize giving, so Titchmarsh got the prize. But just remembering it makes him tetchy. 'Oh, you grit your teeth and carry on - the one award that comes back to haunt you. It would be easier not to bother writing love scenes at all, just leave them out, stop when the bedroom door closes, but I think that's bottling out, and anyway I quite enjoy reading it. I don't labour it or name the parts but I like showing two people getting on.'

And getting into their white fluffy towelling bathrobes, which is always the key moment in any Titchmarsh sex scene. You know it's going to be really steamy when the white bathrobes, white bathsheets and 'crisp' duvets come out - though crispness, come to think of it, is not a particularly desirable quality in a duvet. You'd imagine he'd worked all his life in a bedlinen department rather than a garden. Ah, but that's just it, he explains. 'Because I work in the muck all day, I like to be clean. Nothing grubby for me! Do you know,' he goes on, 'I hadn't realised I'd put a white bathrobe in this novel - isn't that terrible? - it just shows how your subconscious comes out. But doesn't everybody have a white towelling bathrobe?' Not necessarily - they come in all different colours. 'Oh no, it's got to be white. If you see someone wrapped up in a towel, and it's all white and clean and lovely, that's sensuous.' Not black? 'No, that's too kind of 60s isn't it? Black towel, black sheets - that's scary really.' I wondered if he associated white bathrobes with hotel sex, but he said indignantly no, he had a white bathrobe at home. And his wife, Alison? 'Er, she has a pale blue one.'

It is time to stop teasing him and admit that I do actually enjoy his novels, in a Jilly Cooperish sort of way. They are always well-plotted, with likeable characters, and they have great descriptions of landscape and nature. In his latest novel, Animal Instincts, the hero buries his father in 'the stony cliff-top loam'. Could Martin Amis give you soil details like that, could Salman Rushdie? And the moral is very sweet - that we must all cultivate our own gardens or our own patch of countryside rather than telling other people what to do. But the book will probably upset some of his fans because it defends foxhunting - Titchmarsh's line is that although he'd never want to chase and kill an animal himself, hunting is a traditional part of country life and therefore should be preserved.

Basically, though, all his novels are love stories, and it is rare to find a man writing such unabashedly romantic fiction. He says he didn't set out to do it: 'I just wanted to write stories, but the romantic side of me came to the fore. Without sounding posey, in a way you don't get to choose what you write - it comes out the way it's going to come out.' He knows he writes 'feel-good fiction' but that's fine by him - he never likes angst. 'My novels are meant to be a good romp. I know they're not intellectually challenging or seminal works!'

He has already started on his fourth novel, which he says will be about a father-daughter relationship. He writes in the winter, when the television gardening season dies down, in a hut in his garden with 'Barleywood Yacht Club: Members Only' on the door. He is incredibly prolific. Apart from presenting two television series, Ground Force and Gardeners' World, he has written 36 gardening books, and has just signed up to write some more for the BBC, as well as writing three weekly and two monthly gardening columns. He also does occasional after-dinner speaking and personal appearances, though he says he deliberately sets his fee very high so he doesn't get too many of them, otherwise he'd be opening garden centres every weekend. And, of course, he gardens every day for real, not just for television. He says that he could give up television quite easily, but he could never not garden, he needs that daily contact with the soil.

Sex god, gardener, novelist, television star. How did Alan Titchmarsh happen? I mean it's not a career he could have planned as a boy in Ilkley, Yorkshire, in the 50s because sex-god gardeners didn't exist. But he was passionate about gardening from a very early age - he built his first polythene greenhouse when he was 12. Was that normal in Ilkley? 'Oh no, it was odd. Boys were meant to kick a ball in the street or play with a cricket bat. But I had a mate in the street who was also keen on gardening, so that was good. And he said that when he grew up he was going to be a postman because you could do all your work in the morning and then garden all afternoon. But I said, "I'm going to be a gardener because that's all I want to do" - and I did . But Dad, being a plumber, hated gardening, and he told me why later - because as a child he was made to weed for his father and grandfather [who were both professional gardeners] and it put him off. I had no idea at that stage, but Dad had been the odd one out and I was just carrying on the family tradition.'

He was useless at school and felt squashed all the time - he thinks because he was 'too much of an eager puppy'. He was always leaping up saying, 'I can do that' and the teachers were saying, 'Shut up, sit down.' Also, 'I was very small at school, 4ft nothing, and always called Titchymarsh. That was OK, I didn't used to go home and sob, but I didn't enjoy it. And I knew what I wanted to do, I knew where I wanted to go and I just knew I had to do it.' So he left school at 15, with just one O level in art, and went to work for Ilkley Parks Department. He recalls the humiliation of having to water hanging baskets while his former schoolmates walked by, but also the joy of working in the nursery where he was 'blissfully happy, focused'.

Then he went to horticultural college and to Kew Gardens, where he did a three-year diploma course, and was then appointed training supervisor. It was a prestigious job, setting up training courses, and he had his own key to the gardens, and a briefcase with E II R embossed in gold. His office was King George III's dining room. But one day he found himself quietly banging his head on the wall because he was so bored. He says it was 'like a Road to Damascus experience' - he knew he was in the wrong job, and he knew he had to get out.

Soon afterwards, his boss came in with the Gardener's Chronicle open at the situations-vacant page and said, 'Who do we know who's got a literary bent?' And Titchmarsh said, 'Me.' At that stage, the only evidence for his literary bent was the English O level he'd recently taken at nightclass, but anyway he applied for the job as gardening-books editor for Hamlyns, and got it. And when someone failed to deliver a book on greenhouse gardening, he wrote it himself, and then moved to become deputy editor of Amateur Gardening magazine. Meanwhile, in 1975, he married Alison, a dance and games teacher he met through the Barnes and Richmond amateur operatic society, and had two daughters, Polly and Camilla, now 19 and 17. They lived in a tiny two-up, two-down cottage in Sunningdale and were so hard up they sometimes had to hide on Fridays when the milkman came round for his money.

So he was very pleased indeed when, in 1979, television beckoned. There was a sudden plague of greenfly on the south coast and he was sent to Margate to report for Nationwide . 'I suddenly tasted blood. It was God! Wow! Oh my God, I like this. I want to do more.' In fact, he had to wait a year for his next television summons, but soon he was spreading like ground elder, doing gardening spots for Breakfast Time , presenting Songs of Praise and a series called Open Air, and then doing his own chat show on Pebble Mill at One. For 10 years, he was the Wogan of lunchtime television - he interviewed everyone from Placido Domingo to Barry Manilow, from Bette Davis to Julia Roberts (he gave her one of his gardening books) - but I can't find anyone who recalls ever seeing any of his interviews.

Was he any good as an interviewer? 'Yes I think I was quite good. I wasn't aggressive but I hope I wasn't bland. My aim during the course of a lunchtime interview was just to make the viewer's fork pause on its way to their lips.' It sounds rather a modest aim. Was he blander than Parky, blander than Wogan? The test would be if he could give a rough ride to, say, Thora Hird? 'Ah, but then the bottom line is, why would you want to? You can ask an aggressive question that makes you look good, but if you don't get an answer then it's a waste of time. And you can tickle trout can't you?' 'Not personally.' 'I mean, you can go down to the stream with a club and blast around in the water, which is the Paxman technique and extremely good for politicians, but I think there are other techniques. You can ease things out of people without being bland.'

Hmm. It is often said that Steve Coogan's Alan Partridge was partly based on Titchmarsh, but Titchmarsh insists it couldn't be because 'I never wore pullovers like that.' But he recalls interviewing Steve Coogan several times on Pebble Mill at One before he was well known, so 'Perhaps I am like that really. I suppose he just regards me as a rather middle-of-the-road chat-show host - you're a great Aunt Sally for that kind of thing.' Victor Lewis-Smith once wrote that 'The five most debilitating words in the English language are 'Ladies and gentlemen - Alan Titchmarsh' and Titchmarsh has not forgotten it. 'The first time you get real criticism like that it wounds you for a week and you go around thinking "This is the end of my career." So I wrote off to him, and he wrote me this grovelling apology and I really thought, "Ugh, what a comeback." If you're going to say something like that, for goodness sake have the guts to stand up for it. So after that I just didn't bother.'

He doesn't think he failed as an interviewer - after all, the programme ran for 10 years - but on the other hand it didn't lead to anything. Once,Wogan's producer took him out to lunch, but there was no follow-up call. Even now, he admits, 'I watch Michael Parkinson enviously and think I'd like to do that.' But after 10 years of chat-show hosting, it was back to gardening - luckily he'd kept his hand in by writing a gardening column for the Daily Mail - and he took over Gardeners' World when Geoff Hamilton died in 1996. 'So I was back out in the garden, really quite happily, having a breath of air. And then after a year of that, Ground Force came along and it was sort of stratospheric.'

Ground Force really is stratospheric in television terms - it regularly attracts 12 million viewers and comes second only to EastEnders in the ratings. It started quietly on BBC2, but then shifted to BBC1 when the nation collectively fell in love with Charlie Dimmock. Titchmarsh once said apropos Dimmock that he sometimes felt like Prince Charles must have felt when the crowds kept asking 'Where's Princess Di?' Very galling, when he was the expert and supposedly the star. Was his nose put out of joint? 'No, you couldn't let it be, and she's such a sweetheart. But, of course, there is that initial reaction of "Excuse me!" But then you have to ask yourself, "Do I want that kind of attention? Do I want to be photographed everywhere I go." And the answer is no, actually, because that's not my bag. And you know in the days when I started watching gardening programmes there was only Percy Thrower, and it's good to have a variety of folk pushing what to me is my life's passion.'

All my serious gardening friends get very snooty about Ground Force - they loathe the idea that anyone can create a garden in two days, they hate all those 'features' and ready-grown plants. My colleague Monty Don argues that the trouble with any makeover programme is that it 'subverts and by-passes the rhythm of gardening, which is a huge part of the pleasure'. On the other hand, Monty admits that his children love Ground Force - although they hate gardening.

Then there is the pebble question. No Ground Force garden is complete without its pebble path or 'feature' and conservationists worry that people go and nick them off the beaches. It would indeed be ironic if Britain is finally flooded, not by global warming, but because all our sea defences have been removed to make pebble features in patios. But I agree with Titchmarsh that if Ground Force inspires even just one per cent of its viewers to take up gardening, it will have added to the sum of human happiness. And there is convincing evidence that it has done that - the national spend on gardening has gone up by a third over the past two years.

He believes that the English are still the best domestic gardeners in the world (though the Dutch are better at houseplants, and the French and Italians at formal gardens), but we need to work at keeping the tradition alive. That's why, much as he loves Ground Force , he believes Gardeners' World is more valuable, because it's teaching the old skills - how to dig, how to propagate, how to plant, how to prune - which are in danger of being lost. He will give up Ground Force before he gives up Gardeners' World . In fact, he hints he might give it up quite soon, maybe next year, because 'I really want to clear off while we're still at the top. I love doing it, I love enthusing people, I love showing my passion, but it takes a heck of a lot of energy, and I want to stay fresh doing it, I don't want to go off.'

His books, his programmes, his novels have now made him a wealthy man, but he and Alison still live quite modestly. Their only big extravagance was building a 60-seater theatre on their house where they give occasional shows for charity and a Christmas entertainment for the village. They also have a 38ft trawler yacht down at Chichester, which they use to escape at weekends. He recently bought himself a Mazda MX5 'for my midlife crisis' but says his Puritan work ethic would stop him buying a Jaguar. His worst extravagance, he says, is buying old books on topography and he once paid £1,000 for one, but that's as bad as it's ever got. And still his most treasured possession is the budding knife he was given on his first day at work in the Ilkley Parks Department. He still uses it on Gardeners' World . 'They don't make them any more - you can get other budding knives but they're not the same. It's perfectly balanced, it fits the hand well, it still keeps an edge, it's a proper professional budding knife. I remember being given it on my first day and it was pure heaven.'

What seems odd to me is that he hasn't bought a bigger house and garden. He calls his home 'Barleywood' on television, but it is actually number 39 Beech Road or some such address, in one of those pseudo-country Hampshire dormitory villages so beloved by Pony Club girls. And although his garden is terribly long and, of course, beautifully tended, it is basically a narrow strip running very steeply uphill behind the house and partly overlooked by neighbours on either side. It has 'features' every few yards - everything from a gypsy caravan to a Japanese water garden - but it lacks the dreamy enclosed tranquillity of a proper English country garden. He says that gardens should reflect their owners' personality, and perhaps his reflects him - it is busy, cheery, extrovert, improved to within an inch of its life, with none of those dark, mouldy Freudian patches where sinister fungi thrive.

Shyly, blushingly, like a virgin, I confessed that I have just this past year started gardening, and could he give me any tips? Yes, he said masterfully: well-rotted manure, Felco secateurs, and trust your instincts. He believes that most of us have more gardening nous than we know, 'Because it must be basic to us - it's what we did before we wore clothes, before we did anything else. But a lot of us have lost it over the years and we need to find it again. People are too frightened about planting, frightened they'll do something wrong, but there's a lovely line in Laurie Lee where he says his mother handled plants "with a sort of slapdash love" - and I think that's the thing, that sort of casualness, like a woman with 10 babies and she's giving one a bit of bread here and one a cuddle there - you need a feel for them.' And then I asked him what would grow under my oak tree and he wrote down three names - Rubus tricolor, Hypericum calycinum, Hedera hibernica - and I went home happy. What other sex god can give you that?

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