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)

Taylor says he has a pool of eight experts for the show and picks three each week. Flowerdew is virtually always a starting player. "GQT" travels to communities large and small as the guest of local gardening clubs -- some put in their applications to host it more than 20 years ago. The show also has been recorded in the Houses of Parliament, a London subway station and a nudist colony in Kent. Flowerdew gamely stripped for the occasion and then talked about such apt garden life as blue legs, a form of mushroom.

His personal journey is almost as bizarre as his garden. He graduated from college as a financial management accountant and worked in London's financial district for about as long as he could stand it. Thirteen months, to be exact. He then dropped out and worked his way around Europe and North America. His jobs included nude modeling at art colleges, picking grapes in France, working as a maintenance engineer in a pinball arcade and a cook and cleaner at a brothel in the United States. We suppose in Nevada, but there are no more details, except: "After two weeks, it was just like any other job," he said.

When he was 30, he decided to return to his roots in Dickleburgh, rented the unassuming one-story cottage named Harvey Lodge and hung out his shingle as a landscape gardener. He spent a decade living hand-to-mouth, realizing that if he was to make it gardening he would have to stop using his back and start using his brain.

By combining his boundless curiosity and passion for gardening, he taught himself horticultural theory and practice. When he isn't gardening, he's in his personal library of rare and esoteric gardening books.

He has been writing books for the past 15 years and now has approximately a dozen titles, including "Bob Flowerdew's Organic Gardener" and, most recently, an encyclopedia titled "Vegetables, Herbs and Fruit" (with Matthew Biggs and Jekka McVicar).

So forgive his garden for being weird; it's where he does book research and learns to prepare for his radio gig, which he described as a quiz show "where there are no prizes and every answer has to be correct."

The 40 raised vegetable beds at Harvey Lodge are part of the investment in his career, but they are also about practicing what he preaches. He eats well off the land. At this time of year, he says, he and his wife, Vonnetta, get 90 percent of their food from the garden. And a homegrown pineapple, it should be said, contains flavors unknown in the supermarket variety.

His life, he muses, is like that of an old Gallic gardener, skimming the best fruit and vegetables for himself before the bigwigs ever see them. "The French peasant has always lived better than the French nobleman," he says.

Flowerdew seems poised to remain popular. In Britain, if not in Cableland, USA, the garden makeover show has run its course. People have become tired of the repetitive formula and have realized that a garden made in three days isn't a true garden, no matter how voluptuous the expert help.

Growing one's own fruits and vegetables, particularly in the community garden, has become trendy in the past five years as people look for organic produce and the improvement of their diet.

Flowerdew, once considered on the fringes of the garden scene, is now squarely at its center. He seems to be reveling in it, especially in the context of having gotten the boot himself from one of the TV shows a few years back.

"I think most of us are not in contact with the real world. It's all secondhand, and as a human race we are losing something," says Flowerdew. "That's why gardening and cooking are making such a big comeback. They are real and pleasurable."

So look for Flowerdew in the village halls of England for a few years to come, but look for him too in his little patch of Dickleburgh.

"Too many gardeners I know in the media say, 'I don't have time to garden anymore.' " His voice rises in a typical burst of outrage. "Well, what's the point?"

He is also known as being unpredictable in his organic partisanship. To most of his colleagues, using peat moss in soil mixes is environmentally destructive to the bogs in Russia and Canada where they are harvested. Flowerdew says it's a renewable resource. He eats meat -- animals wouldn't have life without our need to eat them, he says -- and he notes that when you munch on a veggie, you kill it. A tomato or an apple, by contrast, is merely an organ the plant wants you to consume to scatter its seed. If the tree huggers "want to be self-righteous, let them survive on fruit," he said. "I lasted four months."

The experiments change but the quest to build his knowledge continues. It seems a perfect arrangement. He gets to live his passion; a grateful nation awaits his answers.

"There's an old Chinese saying," he said. "If you want strawberries, don't sow radishes. It applies to everything in life, doesn't it? We spend all our time sowing radishes when what we really wanted was strawberries."