Gardeners’ World star Joe Swift has revealed that he’s banned something specific from his garden that he has a “thing about”.
In a recent episode of the BBC Gardeners’ World Magazine Podcast (September 26), Joe discussed a garden that the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) asked him to create for pollinators based on a bee’s wing.
As he explained his process, Joe said he actively avoided one thing in particular. The garden designer later disclosed that he finds it “demanding” and once you start using it, you “end up going down” a certain “route”.
Joe said: “I basically said to the nursery guys, ‘Just get me anything you can in flower that’s great for bees that I can get in flower for the Chelsea Flower Show’, because I wasn’t being judged.
“It didn’t have to be 100 percent horticulturally correct, apart from soft pinks was the only colour I avoided, but this doesn’t quite show how much colour there was in their garden.”
When asked why he didn’t use soft pinks, Joe added: “I’ve got a thing about soft pinks. My wife hates me for it, but I like strong pinks.
“I just find that…when you got green and you got lots of different colours in the garden, if you start putting soft pinks in, I find it a really strong colour. I find it really demanding and I find it difficult to work other colours in.”
He explained that he didn’t mind a “strong magenta pink” before saying that he’d inherited hundreds of soft pink roses. Joe said they keep cutting and bringing them into their house and they “smell amazing and stuff”.
However, he also added that using the colour means you end up going down the “soft pinky route” and you “get on the soft pink train” and “can’t get off”.
In the same podcast, Joe revealed that he was once warned by fellow gardening icon Alan Titchmarsh not to stand on his flower bed while they were filming in his garden.
He said Alan explained that if they stepped on his flower-bed, they had to “flick it over with fork” and “leave it nice and tidy” or they faced a “bit of a telling off”.
Joe went on to offer insights into the Chelsea Flower Show and explained how it’s more like a sporting event. He said if they have a three-minute interview, it “takes three minutes” and they “move on to the next thing”.
He added: “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.”
