“There is a kind of expectation when you work as a gardener that we’re nice people,” says Frances Tophill, one of the most famous – and famouslynice– gardeners on our television screens. For the past 10 years she has shared airtime withMonty Don, another famous, nice gardener. “When you work onGardeners’ World, everything islovely. Everything’snice. You have that slight pressure – or an assumption – thatyou’relovely,” she says, laughing. “And that’s sometimes a lot, because I can be not-lovely, you know?”
For the avoidance of doubt, Tophill is completely lovely when we meet. But the niceness ofGardeners’ Worldcan be an oppressive mantle to someone who took it on at the age of 26. The show, which has been running on the BBC for more than 58 years, isASMRfor the middle-aged and beyond; it’s so relaxing that its mere theme tune can induce a sense of calm bordering on the opioid. It has birds tweeting, plants (mostly) growing how they should, and gardening without the personalkneeache. It is, as Tophill says,sonice.
She describes the version of herself that we see on television as something like her phone voice: a mask to hide her “secret self”. Outside what the cameras capture, Tophill is more subversive. “I like to be a bit naughty, but in a very quiet, passive sort of way,” she says. To her, there is more to gardening than people – or even plants – being nice.
Take her show garden, four years ago, at Gardeners’ World Live at the NEC in Birmingham. It was like a dystopian movie set: rusted water butts, thick chains directing the flow of scarce rain, old sinks used as planters, and a teetering corrugated iron shed up a steep steel staircase. It was like something out ofMad Max.As Tophill showed us around the garden on TV, spreading the message of sustainability and of gardening in an increasingly challenging climate, while bees buzzed over the drought-tolerant plants, she never called it what it actually was, nor what she had designed it to be: post-apocalyptic.
“[It was the garden of] someone who’s living post-nuclear fallout, and trying to grow in this post-industrial, post-human landscape,” she says. Tophill had built a monument of death and doom in the middle of the flower show, as a warning, and then stood among it, being lovely. She won best in show.
Expectations of overnight fame
We are chatting on a sofa in the vacant bridal suite of Ripple Court Estate, an 18th-century house turned wedding venue in Kent. Her sister, who started there part-time as a gardener, collects twigs for the dead hedging in the next show garden Tophill is designing: the RHS andThe King’s FoundationCurious Garden – her first at Chelsea.
Outside, the blinding April sun beats down on the white van Tophill drove here. Fitted with insulation and a bed, it takes her around the country on long road trips with her lurcher, Rua. She sleeps there during filming breaks, and it is currently strung with swatches of fabric bunting she has dyed herself using plant pigments for her Chelsea display.
Tophill is “excited, slightly nervous” about making a garden with the King andSir David Beckham, The King’s Foundation ambassador, but she seems more nervous about what’s happening today – her first magazine photoshoot, the kind where there is a moodboard. “Usually I’m just like –” she mimes cartoonishly leaning on a shovel in the dirt, giving a thumbs-up.
Tophill first appeared on our television screens in 2011 after successfully auditioning to co-host ITV’sLove Your GardenwithAlan Titchmarsh. Then aged 23, she thought it would make her famous overnight. She was studying horticulture in Edinburgh at the time and threw a viewing party for her friends when the first episode aired. “I went for breakfast with my friend Tim the next morning and I remember us both being like, ‘Oh my God, this is going to be so intense,’” she says, rolling her eyes and hiding behind her hand, play-acting as a harassed celebrity. “We were in a greasy spoon café expecting to be asked for an autograph. Nothing happened,” she cackles.
She discovered that she felt relieved; fame was not what she wanted after all. “I went for years and years without anyone ever recognising me.” And then, in 2023, she covered for Don, hostingGardeners’ Worldfor the first time while he was away, filming in her own tiny garden in Devon.
The week after her episode was broadcast, she went to help a friend sell plants at an annual flower stall, as she had done every year. However, this time things were different. She was mobbed. “That’s when I got a glimpse of what being Monty must be like,” she says, wide-eyed. To her, it revealed a life without freedom. “I don’t want that.”
Tophill found gardening – like a lot of people do – by accident. She grew up in a family she describes as “eccentric”: her mother, who had trained in art, would take the three sisters out on sunny days to sunbathe and sketch trees in the fields of Kent, and her father still plays the piano accordion in pubs, although Tophill is now too busy to roll his cigarettes while he’s performing. She thoughta job in the artsmight be where she was headed so took a BTEC in jewellery design, where she playfully made Boudica-like armour out of thebronze-cast nipples of her friendsand family, despite having no interest in jewellery. At 19, she woke up one morning and noticed rain on the window. “I wanted to go for a walk in the rain, and thought: maybe I could be a gardener? Surely that must be the worst part of being a gardener – getting rained on.”
She applied for a £2-an-hour apprenticeship at the Salutation, the garden of a Grade I listed manor near her house, but kept her Saturday job in the hosiery department atM&Sto make up for the low pay. She soon found that the physical exhaustion of a proper apprenticeship – cleaning drains, digging holes – was more satisfying than anything she had done before. Suddenly, she could lift the unliftable boxes in the stockroom at M&S. “I was like ‘Oh my God, I’ve got muscles! I’ve never had muscles,’” she says. “It was hard work for a 19-year-old waif who had never done any labour in her life. But that was it: that was the moment I learnt about plants.”
While she had discovered plants, the general ethos of the garden she was working in was at odds with what she liked about them. It was open to the public, with a kitchen garden no one could eat from because it was for display. “I think I saw plants from my apprenticeship as accessories to make the world look nice,” she says. She felt as if something was missing. It was only later, while completing her degree at theRoyal Botanic Gardenin Edinburgh, when everything clicked.
With increasing speed and enthusiasm, Tophill explains: “I started learning about conservation, and ecology, and the relationships of insects and plants, and people and plants, and the history of plants and trade, and the physiology of plants and how their cells work, how photosynthesis works, how mycorrhizal fungal bacterial interactions within soil can affect the growth of a plant – and all of that just blew my mind.”
It’s this part – the mind-blowing, heart-swelling curiosity – that made her the perfect fit to design theCurious Garden at Chelsea, which aims to encourage people to consider a career in horticulture by making that enthusiasm contagious. At the centre will be a building called the Museum of Curiosities, showcasing everything plants can do – from making fabric and medicine to even hats – with a microscope revealing the cells that build them.
Advertisement
“Basically, it’s showing that plants aren’t just pretty, they are part of human history, economic history, and cultural history,” Tophill says. “That’s where my fascination with it is.” When she speaks about her own garden in Devon – where she grows only things with a purpose, even if she never quite finds the time to make the oil infusions, the beer or the smudge sticks from a kind of sage that grows only in California – she sounds quietly witchy. But all of this is about the relationship between humans and the plants we grow.
‘New gardeners want to do everything’
Her involvement in the Chelsea garden began last August. She was driving to France for a camping trip when she got a call from the RHS pitching her the plan. She was to be the practical linchpin that held it all together in a cohesive way, fusing all that was important to both the King and Beckham. Tophill travelled toHighgrove in Gloucestershireto meet the King’s gardening team (she briefly entertained the idea of a show garden filled with “crazy, looming”, Tim Burtonesque topiary to hark back to the kind in the King’s own garden, but she has abandoned this idea for now) and heard the word “harmony” repeatedly.
As the King is also adedicated watercolour painter, Tophill wanted to bring an artist’s sensibility to the design, too. “He’s got loads of acers, so I’m thinking about the colours and the placements and the views,” she says. “Everyone keeps saying that he’s so detail-focused that he’ll notice all the tiny things.” This is also why she’s scouring the internet for the perfect gnome, in homage to the one in the King’s whimsical Highgrove garden. “He hides it in the stumpery for the gardeners to find,” she laughs. The RHS is lifting its gnome ban for only the second time in history, partly to celebrate the King’s tradition, while also auctioning off gnomes decorated by celebrities to raise money for the RHS Campaign for School Gardening.
As well as this, Tophill wants to harnessBeckham’s enthusiasm for gardening, including a nod to his love of beekeeping with a woven willow beehive. He gave Tophill a list of his favourite plants to include – things such as the catnip Nepeta ‘Six Hills Giant’ – but the list was so comprehensive it also featured things like hyacinths and snowdrops, which are out of season in May. Mostly, though, the list was full of vegetables. “He wasreallykeen on garlic, so I was likeOK…” Tophill looks unsure but resolute: “I started growing garlic on my allotment, and I said to him: ‘I really hope you don’t get your hopes up for this garlic. I’m doing my best with it, but my allotment is quite shady.’ He replied: ‘I don’t care! Sounds great. It will be nice to see your garlic!’”
Beckham is still relatively new to gardening, and retains the new gardener’s refusal to be told something won’t work – and this has become key to the design of the garden. “A new gardener doesn’t have to be a bad gardener. New gardeners aren’t basic – they want to doeverything.So that’s what fed into this: trying everything. It’s not going to be a designery-looking garden; it’s going to be a real person’s garden. It’s a little section of this, and a little section of that. It’s how I feel new gardeners garden, and how real gardeners garden,” she says. “I still garden that way.”
Part of the joy of an episode ofGardeners’ Worldhosted by Tophill is its relatability. She doesn’t have much space. She doesn’t have much sun, or she has too much. And sometimes things just don’t work. She laughs as she recalls a short segment she filmed years ago, when she proudly held up a small cabbage she had grown on her own desolate, windblown allotment. To her, this was an impossible achievement. The edit then cut straight to Don harvesting a colossal “two-arm job” cabbage at Longmeadow.
“I realised that my thing is always a little bit basic,” she says. “But I kind of like holding the flag for that.” And this is where Tophill wants to remain – in the attainable part of the garden. What she keeps coming back to is the idea of what’s real, and where she can make a difference. She doesn’t want to be mobbed for selfies, mostly because it stops her being able to help in any practical way – even if it’s just pricing up plants at a flower stall.
She says that starting out onLove Your Garden– a surprise transformation show – is probably why she’s so keen to keep her feet on the ground now. “We were going into people’s houses, often at their lowest points,” she says. “I remember one particularly brutal one – I still cry, I hope I don’t cry now. He was this lovely kid called Harry. He was 15, and he had terminal cancer. Single parent family, only child – this mum in Hull was facing her son’s death.” Harry kept lizards, he grew plants for his terrariums, he had ducks, and he was dying of an aggressive bone cancer. “He had this bucket list of 30 things he wanted to do before he died and one of them was stand under a waterfall. Another one was ‘my duck to lay an egg’. He was just this nature-loving guy and we made this garden for him.”
In early 2020, a month after the episode was filmed, Harry died. “Meeting a person like that, it’s like –” Tophill is blinking at the ceiling, trying to stop tears. “Sorry, I can’t think about that guy without crying.” She pauses. “That’s what makes the world, you know? It’s not me swanning around theChelsea Flower Show, or anyone else. It’s these real people who are going through real things.”
Tophill sees an interest in nature and gardens as a way to help combat not only the climate crisis, but also an urgent social crisis. “We’re all angry because we feel there’s nothing we can do about the way things go,” she says. “People don’t think they will be listened to.” She knows that weaving wicker baskets, orgrowing flowers, can seem futile – irrelevant even – given everything happening in the world. But she is adamant there is more to it: she has seen first-hand, while filmingGardeners’ Worldin Bradford, how participating in community gardens can give a sense of cohesion to an otherwise segregated society.
“It’s not the only solution, but I feel really passionately that gardening can be a solution to help escape whatever difficult circumstance you might be in,” she says. “A lot of talk is about finances – and yes, people are struggling – but actually, it’s more existential than that: it’s about community. It’s about working together. It’s about feeling like there’s a place in the world for you.”
As she passes the 10-year mark onGardeners’ World,Tophill is starting to take stock of what a TV career has added to, and taken away from, her life. Now 36, she says working alongside newer presenters onGardeners’ Worldwho are around her age makes her feel old, simply because she’s been there so long.
“I do wonder if it would have been helpful to have had that extra 10 years to form who I am before rolling with this weird shift in my life trajectory,” she says. “Like, I haven’t had kids – I wonder, would I have had kids? It’s fine,” she says, waving it away, reluctant to push her personal life into the spotlight . “But it makes you realise – I was really young at the time.” She’s not looking for a career change, but she believes she’s on the brink of a new adventure. “I feel like when you get to this age, you’re more empowered to just be OK with who you are. And I’m not a person who ever wants to be famous.”
While we’ve been talking, her estate agent has been calling. Tophill is trying to sell the old stone house she bought in Devon – the one from which she hosted episodes ofGardeners’ World– because she is so rarely there. She lives alone and feels that a house like that needs to be lived in and warmed with fire – otherwise it becomes too dark and cold to come home to. She’s downsizing to somewhere more modern, but is adamant she won’t be hosting any episodes ofGardeners’ Worldat her new place – she doesn’t like being told what she can and can’t do with her own garden, or which way she should lay her path for a better picture, and she’s uncomfortable with TV crews disturbing her neighbours.
If she is sure of anything, she knows she never wants to be the newMonty Don. “I’ve kind of done it. I’m not hungry for it. I’ve seen where it goes.” Mostly, she just wants to be the real Frances. “As I get older, I feel like that subversiveness might come out a little more vocally. Possibly not in this project,” she laughs, pulling it back to her Chelsea garden. “Might be the wrong crowd…”
RHS Chelsea Flower Show runs from May 19 to 23
“There is a kind of expectation when you work as a gardener that we’re nice people,” says Frances Tophill, one of the most famous – and...
