Product Description

How to be a Gardener is the BBC's most ambitious gardening project ever. Led by Alan Titchmarsh it includes eight hours of primetime television and two major hardback books. There's no great mystery to being a successful gardener - most of it is just plain common sense - but an appreciation of the natural world at work in our gardens will certainly help. The culmination of years of experience, Alan has distilled his knowledge and passion for the subject into the two volumes of How to be a Gardener. In Book 1 he sets out the basic principles of gardening and in Book 2 he builds on this with expert advice on planting and design. Both books stand alone but together they provide a complete reference manual for any garden owner.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #27446 in Books
• Published on: 2002-02-21
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 264 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
No safer pair of hands than those of Alan Titchmarsh could be imagined to coax the nervous would-be gardener into picking up a spade. The BBC evidently think so, as they have commissioned the two series and accompanying volumes of How To Be A Gardener, their most ambitious gardening project to date. The elevation of gardening in recent years from a genteel pastime to national mania, fuelled largely by television, seems to have engendered a large audience of virtual gardeners, keen to get their hands dirty but unsure of how to begin.

No doubt the outstanding success (even by her own standards) of Delia Smith's comparable How to Cook trilogy formed an encouraging precedent. Just as Delia set out to give her readers and viewers the basic skills from which to build a confident technique, so Alan Titchmarsh in this first volume takes his pupils back to the basics ("Back to Basics" is the book's sub-title) of soil types and management, plant growth, seasonality, maintenance and pest control. It's a thorough, utterly professional, novice-friendly job; not all that different from a number of other manuals of garden basics, but self-recommending by the confidence its author inspires--the product on the one hand of a lifetime's expertise and on the other of his inimitable personality. --Robin Davidson

Review
'I want you to get a feel for gardening...to use all your senses - touch, taste, smell, sight and hearing - to make you a good gardener.' Alan Titchmarsh

Customer Reviews

Welcome to the Jungle!
My wife and I required help. We had just bought a house with gardens that required much attention - Lawns that had had many football tournaments played on them, flowerbeds that resembled war zones and barren areas of land that made the Sahara desert look positively fertile.

We had studied many gardening books, many of which were good, but none aimed at the 'absolutely useless'. After watching Mr. Titchmarsh's series on back to basics gardening we decided to check out the accompanying book.

Were we impressed? Absolutely. There's everything here that the beginner could wish for. What tools you require and their uses. Garden pests and ways to remove them. Correct ways, positions, and times of year of planting, to name but a few topics. My only gardening 'skill' was mowing the lawn. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that I'd been doing it wrong (Cutting too short, not removing dead grass, etc).

If the only time you get green fingers is after picking your nose (sorry) then this is a perfect book and cannot be recommended enough.

Does what the title says
A very well written book in simple language, yet full of valuable information from start to finish. Mr Titchmarsh takes you through a brief explanation of what gardening is or should be and onto the basic fundamentals explaining about soil and how plants live, breath and grow. Easy to read and excellent photographs. i particularly enjoyed the sections on pests which will hopefully get rid of the army of never ending slugs in my garden! Written with his usual sense of humour I found it more like a one to one chat than reading a book. Very informative for the whole spectrum of gardening, can't wait for the tv series.

If you only buy one gardening book, make it this one!
The secret of Alan Titchmarsh's success lies in his ability to communicate with novices and old hands alike, at the same time and with neither feeling patronised or talked down to. He is at the same time a teacher, friend and fount of all wisdom. I particularly liked the section on design which made it quite impossible to fail to produce results. I have been a gardener for a few years, and found that this book plugged some of the gaps that inevitably occur when one is self-taught. For the beginner, it could quite possibly be the only book you will need (for a few years at least!)