A Growing Influence

"I think most of us are not in contact with the real world. . . . As a human race we are losing something," says Bob Flowerdew. (By Francesca Yorke -- Getty Images)

As hunky as Flowerdew, 53, may be to his adoring fans, everyone agrees that it is his unique horticultural knowledge that sustains the interest.

In the off-the-beaten-track village of Dickleburgh, Flowerdew has spent the past 23 years turning his little green three-fourths of an acre into an intensively cultivated patch of land. Hemmed in by a road and surrounding properties, it might just as easily be in a suburb of London as in a fogbound hamlet in East Anglia. But this is the village where he grew up, and there has been a Flowerdew tilling the Norfolk soil since the 1400s, though some Flowerdews made it to Colonial Virginia.

The first thing that strikes you about the garden at Harvey Lodge is that it is about as far from the archetype of the flowery, bowery English garden as you can get. Yes, rambling roses are woven onto fences, but the grapevines are out of control and everywhere, it seems, there are old car tires, sheets of plastic and bits of old carpet.

Flowerdew is a thrifty recycler, in keeping with his organic gardening persona; the tires, now planters, are but one example of this. In a greenhouse, you find yourself walking on a metal path that is actually a line of old radiators half buried in the mud. Flowerdew's potting bench is a former deep freeze, and he has rainwater and bath-water storage and transportation systems that would make the desert dwellers of "Dune" seem wasteful.

He has woven peach tree stems into contorted orbs, to see if they can be squeezed into small gardens and still yield plenty of fruit. "I really can't recommend it yet," he said.

He points to a shrub called the cornelian-cherry dogwood, whose yellow blossoms turn to bright red berries used as a preserve. "I must admit," he said, "I can't get my mouth around them, even with sugar."

"I think he's viewed as eccentric, extremely knowledgeable, interesting and entertaining," said Tim Rumball, editor of Amateur Gardening, a weekly magazine.

Think of Flowerdew's garden as a laboratory run by a mad professor. "Some of the borders look a mess," said Rumball, "but it's a charming garden once you look beyond the strangeness of it."

Unconstrained by the norms of mainstream horticulture, Flowerdew will put anything to the test, including grafting cabbages onto other veggies to prevent club root disease or seeking to extract dye from the woad plant, as the ancient Britons once did.

We enter his sanctum sanctorum, a polypropylene greenhouse inside a larger one. It is all a little makeshift and made safe against winter nights with a couple of simple space heaters. Here, he experiments with some of his oddest subjects: the tropical guava shrub, a banana tree, a bizarre fruit called a custard apple and a ring of fruiting pineapple plants on the edge of a pond. He harvests one of the fruits and twists off the top cluster of leaves. Peeling away the bottom leaves, he shows flat, orange, wormlike ridges. These are the roots of a new plant, waiting to grow. Pot them in your heated greenhouse or conservatory and, lo, after three years you will have full-size fruiting pineapples ready for the table, he says.

This is a fruit that has always captivated the English. A hundred years ago, the finest estates had special hothouses and teams of gardeners to raise them. But Flowerdew grows them with simple methods and patience in a plastic greenhouse, and he has taught the British gardening public to do the same. At events, newfound pineapple growers come up to him and worship at his feet.

"It's not that difficult, actually," he mutters. The Victorian gardeners may have made it sound like a dark art, he says, "but these old boys had a job to protect." In breaking this myth, Flowerdew has elevated his own. He is now seeking to prove that fuchsia bushes should be grown for their edible berries as well as their exotic blooms.