Alan Titchmarsh is back on our screen this weekend for two episodes of Love Your Weekend with Alan Titchmarsh. The gardening expert and presenter, now 75, has long been sharing his knowledge of gardening tips and tricks with viewers.
From 1996 until 2002, he hosted BBC’s Gardeners’ World and through the years has also presented the Alan Titchmarsh Show and Love Your Garden. This Saturday and Sunday, he is joined by special guest on Love Your Weekend with Alan Titchmarsh, celebrating the great British countryside.
As you can probably imagine, Alan’s own garden is exquisite. He and his wife Alison, who have been married since 1975 and have two children, live in a gorgeous Grade-II listed Georgian farmhouse in Hampshire and have previously given fans a glimpse into their stunning space, The Express reports.
The garden features a sprawling green space that Alan has spent many years transforming. It was back in 2019 that he opened up for the first time about his garden on the Fifty Shades of Green with Alan Titchmarsh programme. Celebrating 50 years spent in gardens, he visited his 50 favourite horticultural spots around Britain.
But he saved the best until last as the number one spot was Alan’s own garden. Alan has lived at his Hampshire home for more than 20 years.
Alan and Alison set about creating their dream garden when they bought the house in 2002. The TV veteran had previously presented TV shows from his past two gardens. But this time he was determined the space would be purely for him and his family – a place of solace and enjoyment.
However, in 2021, he virtually opened the gates to his garden again in support of the National Garden Scheme to help raise funds for charities during the coronavirus pandemic. He said: “It’s only now that I’ve been happy to let the cameras in for the first time.”
Speaking from his home in Hampshire, Alan shared glorious glimpses of his own, very private garden to celebrate his 50 years in gardening, 40 in broadcasting and 70 on earth.
Photos, courtesy of the National Garden Scheme, capture the beautiful space. As most would expect from the country’s leading gardening expert, Alan’s outdoor space is absolutely breathtaking and these small glimpses of the gardening expert’s home reveal a very English garden.
Described on the site as a “romantic English garden”, it features a beautiful wildflower meadow that provides a haven for bees and other wildlife and magnificent water features, including more than 10 mini waterfalls. Rather than safe, soft pastels, Alan plants flowerbeds with a mixture of colours from border perennials, flowering shrubs, roses and trees.
Throughout the garden, roses and topiary are mixed together with ornaments and rare plants to create a picturesque space that seems like it was almost plucked out of the pages of a romance novel. The terrace and lawns around the house are formal in shape, but he plants the beds in “a billowing mass, the informal planting softening the formal geometry”.
Alan has also implemented a wildflower meadow, which he says is one part of his garden he “prizes more than all others”, to encourage wildlife into his garden. Buying an extra two acres, he sowed a wildflower mixture by hand.
Now, his greatest delight is watching the meadow (adjacent to a birch grove) change through the seasons, with cowslips in April, through to marjoram and field scabious in summer. The space is completed by the highlight of the garden – neatly manicured lawns and tree-lined paths.
As a fan of organic gardening for more than 30 years, Alan does not use chemical weed killers or fertilisers. His lawns get a feed of blood, fish and bonemeal, and daisies and dandelions are pulled out with a daisy-grubber. Small weeds are allowed to remain.
Alan’s love affair with greenhouses began early, when he built his first one, aged 12, out of salvaged lumps of wood, bits of timber and a sheet of polythene. His present structure, with its Victorian design, is considerably smarter, but “the pleasure remains the same”.
He grows some of his favourite plants there, from pelargoniums to geraniums, and cucumbers to tomatoes, plus a sweet mimosa from Elton John’s garden. Alan has always loved the neatness of rills – shallow channels of water cut into the soil. His own makes a soothing, burbling sound.
Alan said: “There is a moment at 11.30am on a June day when the sun shines right down that rill and turns each of those little tiny waterfalls silver, and I can set my watch by it and it’s lovely.” The rill replaced a row of eight ornamental pear trees which, after 16 years, had grown too big, obscuring views and casting shade – so Alan “bit the bullet” and chopped them down.
At the centre of the circular lawn is a pond with a copy of a sculpture at Kew Gardens, Winged Boy With Dolphin, by the Italian Renaissance artist Andrea del Verrocchio. It reminds Alan of Kew, where he once worked.