You can trace the entire history of Britain by looking at gardens.

The biggest obstacle to good gardening is the desire to know the answers and not the questions.

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.

I'm bad at sleeping. I get somewhere between three and six hours a night.

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

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 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 think that most people are aware that it takes so much oil and water to produce what they're eating. But the problem is inherent within the solution, in so much as you don't want to tell people what to do.

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.