Alan Titchmarsh says he has always wanted to work as a gardener and still enjoys growing plants because his daughter warned him about a promising career.
Alan Titchmarsh admits his daughter “was right” after she sent him a firm warning. The 76-year-old has been a popular face on television screens since launching his broadcasting career in 1977.
It came as Alan joined BBC Radio 4’s You and Yours and The Today Programme as a gardening expert. Before then he had spent his career writing and editing gardening books as well as working as a gardener.
Alan lives in Hampshire, where he films his popular Love Your Weekend, with wife Alison, a retired teacher. The couple share adult daughters Camilla and Polly together.
Alan claims that Polly sent him a warning on the Lessons From Our Mothers podcast. He claimed that while Camilla worked as a classroom assistant for a while, Polly had stated that I am very patient with plants but wouldn’t have the patience to deal with kids, her older daughter also became a teacher, like her mother, Alison was a teacher, and her younger sister now works interior design and property searches, etc.
According to Alan, he said he thinks he found his calling after learning how to garden. He continued, “I adore my children and grandchildren, but I think she’s right. I love them both. I do have a higher tolerance for people than plants. “Plants are not wind-up merchants,” explains the statement.
As a youngster, Alan confessed that he would use his pocket money to go to Woolworths to purchase seeds in his garden. He claims that because nasturtiums “just right for my small fingers to press into the ground,” he would typically choose them.
He eventually transitioned from his family’s Yorkshire home to a polythene lean-to before transitioning to a greenhouse. He stated in a letter to the Daily Mail that all he wanted to do was garden.
He left school in 1964 at the age of 15 and only had one O-level in art. After that, he made the decision to enroll in a day-release horticulture apprenticeship at Ilkley Council.
Alan moved to Hertfordshire in 1968, and he soon found himself working at Kew’s Royal Botanical Gardens. He made the decision to work in horticulture journalism in 1974.
However, Alan claims that his “feverishness for growing flowers, trees, fruit and vegetables” is still present even in his seventies. Alan recently acknowledged that as a result of his “pottering” experience, time can “slip away” now.
He wrote in Gardeners’ World Magazine that “there are those who become maudlin about the speed at which “time flies” and that, true to form, hours, minutes, and seconds pass through one’s fingers more quickly.
A seven-year-old perceives a year as their “seventh of their life,” according to Alan, while a 70-year-old perceives a 70-year-old’s year as their “seventh of their life.”
