Joe Swift (L) was only allowed into Alan’s garden on strict conditions (Image: Birmingham Post & Mail)
Garden designer Joe Swift has revealed legend once warned him not to stand on his flowerbed when filming in his garden.
There can’t be many more nerve-wracking jobs, for a gardener, than working on Alan Titchmarsh’s garden. For over 40 years, Alan has carved himself a niche as the nations’s favourite gardener, taking over as host of Gardeners’ World with the show being filmed in his own garden.
So it would have been with some trepidation that garden designer Joe stepped into Alan’s garden to do some filming for the show. On the Gardeners’ World podcast, he told host Monty Don that Alan is very exacting about visitors covering their tracks before they leave.
He said: “Alan did say if you’d trodden on a flower-bed, you had to flick it over with fork and leave it nice and tidy, or you get a bit of a telling off. So there weren’t footprints or compacted soil and all that sort of thing.”
Alan at The RHS Chelsea Flower Show (Image: Getty)
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Joe is used to working under pressure though. He describes the Chelsea Flower Show as being more like a sporting event than anything to do with normal gardening.
He explains: “If it’s a three minute interview it takes three minutes and then you move on to the next thing.
“So you have to take in a huge amount of information very quickly. You know, the name of the garden, what the garden is all about, the plants, then the name of the designer…and they let you go.”
Joe and Alan opening the Gardeners’ World Live Show (Image: bpm)
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By contrast, Joe adds, Gardener’s World operates at a much more leisurely pace, and involves a good deal of repetition. Because there’s just one camera – rather than the four used for the Chelsea Flower Show shoots – he is obliged to ask the same question more than once.
“You have to repeat everything 3 or 4 times,” he explains. “So if I’m interviewing you, you’d be so bored of question by the end of it because I have to get close up again. Mid shot. They get why they all these different shots. We’ve got one camera so we have to keep repeating it.
“Whereas a Chelsea there’s four cameras sometimes five cameras. And so it’s very quick.”