Alan Titchmarsh is quintessentially English, from his last name to his loves—gardening, dogs, country life and the Queen. Best known to Americans from the imported gardening makeover series, Ground Force, Titchmarsh is a celebrity in Britain. He hosts the BBC’s round the clock coverage of the Chelsea Flower Show every year, has written numerous garden books, hosted several garden TV series and undertaken various commercial projects, including designing and endorsing a line of garden tools for a retail chain. He is, in a word, ubiquitous.
The newest Titchmarsh book is My Secret Garden (BBC Books, 2012). I don’t have all of his books, but this one, which portrays his personal plot in words and gorgeous photographs by Jonathan Buckley, sounded interesting.
From 1996-2002, Titchmarsh was the host of Gardener’s World, a venerable BBC gardening show. In a genteel form of reality television, the program was filmed in his own two-acre garden, Barleywood, with new weekly episodes airing from February through November each year. This meant that his wife, Alison, had to put up with camera crews on the doorstep for six years. It is not surprising that when the couple moved to their current Georgian house and grounds ten years ago, Titchmarsh promised Alison that the garden would be private. Not only would the beds and borders never show up on the BBC, but they would not even open for the British National Garden Scheme’s Garden Open Days.
But Alan Titchmarsh is Alan Titchmarsh and he eventually succumbed to the urge to publicize the new plot. The result is My Secret Garden, which is a great mid-winter read for gardeners.
Like many gardening books, My Secret Garden is broken out by seasons, starting with spring. There are plenty of luscious close-ups of flowers, including one of hellebores that look better than any hellebores I will ever grow. They are, of course, underplanted with spring-blooming cyclamens, also more numerous and lovely than any I will nurture with my paltry American green thumbs. Still, the inspiration inspired by the pictures and eminently readable text overwhelms my sense of inherent horticultural inferiority.
Titchmarsh began his professional gardening life at fifteen, as an apprentice gardener for the local municipality. He admits that this background gave him a passion for order and neatness in the landscape. He makes great use of clipped shrubbery to provide structure, defining garden areas with all kinds of boxwood and yew trimmed into cones, balls, lollipops and even topiary birds. To counterbalance all that formality and discipline, the planting schemes enclosed and defined by that wealth of shrubbery are much more loose and open. Drifts of all kinds of plants predominate, as Titchmarsh cleaves to the old garden wisdom of planting in odd number groups—three, five or seven of a particular species or variety.
He confesses to a fondness for well-loved, tried and true plants. The pictures bear this out, with lots of roses, alliums, agapanthus and delphiniums. Titchmarsh admits that he goes to great lengths to keep slugs from devouring the latter, but persists in growing them anyway. Useful tips are frequent—like underplanting the delphiniums with hardy geraniums to camouflage the delphiniums’ ugly “legs”.
As you might expect, the Titchmarsh establishment has outbuildings, including a summer house and a greenhouse/conservatory. It also has sculpture sprinkled throughout the planting scheme, but the art is not pretentiously described or displayed and many of the pieces are reproductions of famous originals. Titchmarsh is, after all, a well-paid British star, not a fabulously wealthy American one.
What appeals about My Secret Garden is Alan Titchmarsh’s love of the creativity of gardening. He is clearly fond of color, open spaces, reliable plants and an artful mixture of order and chaos. He is an organic gardener and stresses that he is a plantsman who designs rather than the other way around. In the introduction he freely admits that he has help in maintaining his lovely garden spread, thanking his gardener, handyman, tree surgeon and lawn mowing helper.
Photographer Jonathan Buckley is an artist with a camera and even if you don’t read a word of the text, the pictures alone are worth the price of the book. Unlike other books of this type, there are no “before and after” pictures, only “after”. Titchmarsh frequently describes the process by which he transformed his garden over the past decade, but its beginnings are left to the readers’ imaginations.
I am sure that Alan Titchmarsh’s agent and publisher encouraged him to create a book about his “new” garden and he admits to missing the audience element that he had while hosting Gardener’s World. In the end though, I believe him when he sums up his ultimate motivation—“…the experience is meant to be shared; so are the gardens.”