I feel ashamed if my hands are too clean and untouched. It's a measure of how much time I've spent travelling and poncing around.

It does seem to me that the British in particular, British horticultural literature and television programmes, focus a huge amount on how we garden and hardly at all on why we garden.

From the ages of 18 to 50 I ran, rowed and lifted weights at my home gym.

I loathe nowheres - airports and bland hotels. I would rather be in an unpleasant, uncomfortable place rather than one just adrift, floating around.

I see myself as a writer who happens to garden.

The farm uses up a lot of my creative urges. It's a sort of rough and ready space, I don't film there.

I like dogs because they are not humans.

The key to our oldest woodland is that it has been cut down and regrown, in some cases as often as 50 or 60 times. It is one of the most perfectly sustainable resources and ecosystems known to man.

My gardening apprenticeship was similar to the way a chimney sweep is pushed up a chimney. It was enforced by my parents, non-negotiable - it would be weeding the strawberries, mowing the grass.

I do wear gloves for things that sting a lot or prick a lot. But I just like to feel with my hands. I find gloves cumbersome and uncomfortable and I've got tough old hands so the old cut doesn't matter.

Some plants become weeds simply by virtue of their success rather than any other factor. You merely want less of them.

Bamboos can go from shining health to shabbiness in weeks. The problem is too much wind, too little water and tired compost.

My favourite thorn belongs to the rose with a name like a mouthful of broken teeth, Rosa sericea pteracantha. It is grown almost entirely for its astonishing ruby-red shark's fin thorns that are at their lapidary best in early summer, especially when backlit by a low setting sun.

I don't think about being the Colin Firth of the gardening world. I live a very insular world based around my family and my home, and to them I'm not the Colin Firth of anything.

My basic philosophy is never do anything with the word 'celebrity' attached to it. Without being overly pompous, if you have worked hard to have an audience trust you a bit, why blow it? That is my currency.

I live in the middle of country so I walk a lot.

We don't value food in Britain, so therefore the cheaper it is the better it is. We all eat far too much, we all pay far too little for our food. We have environmental problems, we have health problems, we have food transport problems.

I was brought up a strict Christian. My father was a lay preacher, my mother a church warden. The rhythm and ritual of the Anglican Church was part of our lives.

Blackthorn has wicked spikes that are highly brittle and tend to snap off under the skin and then fester horribly. This means that they can only really be part of a hedge that you do not want to get too close to.

I think that's my strength, that I am an amateur gardener who loves gardening. I've read about it, I've written about it, I've done it all my life but at heart, I'm just a passionate amateur gardener.

I had a difficult relationship with my parents, who died young, but they instilled self-discipline and a sense of honour and loyalty and accountability. I'm grateful for that.

I just think that gardening is about the future, a slow thing, that is deep and spiritual as well as spiritually rewarding.

In my teens I wanted to be a rock star, I really did. At that time there was nothing I wanted more.

The thing the British hate more than anything else is people who are getting above themselves. There are a hundred different expressions for it all around the country, but it comes down to the same thing: this inherent mistrust of authority, and trying to topple people off a pedestal.