Up the garden path with Alan

On Ilkley Moor, there once stood a tiny stone cottage in which there lived a little boy whom no one rated. People called him Titch, a contraction of his surname, but, truth be told, he was also titchy, the shortest boy in the whole school.

In class, he put his hand up so often and got the wrong answer so frequently that his teachers told him to shut up. Outside it, he dreamed not of football or Airfix, but gardening, which meant his hero wasn't someone sensible like Danny Blanchflower or Dan Dare but Percy Thrower, the man with the tweed jacket, tie and trowel on the BBC's Gardening Club. He left school with just one O-level, all 4ft 10in of him.

Alan Titchmarsh is now 52 and 5ft 9in. He has three TV series on the go, a diploma in horticulture, an MBE, a waxwork (the first effigy of a gardener in Tussaud's since Thrower himself), a sweet pea and a lupin named after him and is regularly called, with what degree of seriousness it is hard to say, one of Britain's sexiest men. With me this afternoon he spends an awful lot of time not quite, but almost, boasting about his late-flowering success.

He lets slip that his garden makeover show, Ground Force, now beats Who Wants To Be a Millionaire. He mentions that his latest novel, Just Dad, reached number six on the bestseller lists. He calls himself a scientist, which, strictly speaking, I suppose he is, but maintains that gardeners are also artists. In the old days, he explains, the British learned gardening from the elders of their tribe. Now, he implies, they learn it from him - or certainly can do if they watch his new series, How to be a Gardener, and read the accompanying volumes. They do for gardening, he says, risking the ultimate lËse-majestÈ, what Delia Smith's How to Cook did for cooking.

The package will, no doubt, be a huge success. The first of the two books is a feat of organisation and expertise while remaining cheerily colloquial. Reading it is like having the garden gnome he so greatly resembles, natter in your ear, gnomically: "Mulching is blooming marvellous but it can't work miracles." "Potting compost is like giving plants a dinner party instead of asking them to survive on a bag of crisps."

For all that, non-gardeners will still prefer his other show, Ground Force, for its simple, sentimental narratives of transformation, the team's hangovers on day two and, of course, bra-less Charlie Dimmock.

"It's inspirational," he says, making more elevated claims for its popularity. "It makes people who wouldn't necessarily watch a gardening programme go outside and it shows them how to make an environment in which they can live."

Does he spot his influence on the nation's backyards? "Like, 'Oh God, what have I done?' No, it's lovely. Where you used to go past gardens that were tips, you can now see bubble fountains. It's very easy to knock. It's a very soft target. But it's lovely."

So what did his co-workers, Charlie Dimmock and Tommy Walsh, say when he announced he was leaving after the next series? "They were surprised and a bit disappointed, I think. But I have to do the designs as well. I say have to. I do. It takes time. And I wanted to quit while I was ahead."

The argument against Ground Force, however, is not that it emphasises paving over planting, that it believes decking is the answer to everything (although it gets so slimy and slippery), or its implication that all a garden needs is 48 hours and a thousand quid.

The case against is that soppy makeover shows are not what the BBC is there for. BBC2, especially, should be aiming higher. I mean, in times gone by the BBC would have had David Frost interview Nelson Mandela. Now they send Titchmarsh to tart up his garden.

Titchmarsh gets snippy when I say this. "I'd had 10 years of experience as an interviewer on Pebble Mill. So I like to think that there are other skills I brought to the job as well. But it wasn't a deep political interview, it was to make a garden for everybody's hero. We did and then I got to chat with him.î

My point is that the BBC might have taken a slightly graver approach to a world statesman. "Graver doesn't necessarily mean more worthwhile. It sometimes means more dull."

But if the BBC had secured an interview with Adolf Hitler they wouldn't have put it out on Down Your Way? "Wrong way round. Wrong way round. We made a garden for Nelson Mandela and he came back to it and looked at it, and I'd have been daft if I hadn't interviewed him."

I let the matter drop. When he leaves Ground Force - where nation speaks water feature unto nation - he will still have Gardeners' World, which he has presented from his own idyllic garden in Hampshire, since 1996. Rerun immortality will be bestowed on him by How to be a Gardener. Nevertheless. his status as, after Delia, the nation's favourite specialist, disguises the fact that he did not fulfil his promise as a generalist. After 10 years presenting daytime programmes from Pebble Mill, the mud still clung to him. During this period he once protested: "I've got to branch out. I've got to drop this man with a spade image."

When a comfy chats-how slot fell vacant, the BBC chose not him but Michael Parkinson, and Parkinson then added insult to injury by inviting him on and getting Cindy Crawford to read out sex scenes from his novels. Sex in a Titchmarsh novel is all white towelling and honey-coloured bodies - as sanitary as sex can get - but it was still a humiliating moment.

"I was disappointed. That's the word that sums it up most. I was actually disappointed. I was used to watching him interviewing Fred Astaire and people like that. I was disappointed that he felt a need to do that. But I think it's because I was a fellow Yorkshireman."

Who's the better interviewer, him or Parky? "I couldn't possibly comment." I remind him about wishing to drop his man-with-spade image. So he changed his mind, he says. But the other day on Ground Force, when it was bucketing down, he wailed about wanting to be in a nice warm studio like Terry Wogan. "It was a joke. I wouldn't want to come into Broadcasting House every morning at 7am."

We look across the road from the hotel room where we are talking towards that well-heated edifice. He prefers the rain, does he? "Indeed, yes."

And never hoped to be the next Michael Aspel? "Well funnily enough, you're right, it could have gone either way. Absolutely right. But that didn't come. That door was closed and the other one was open. Now, you either stand at the door and beat loudly on it and get nowhere, or you think, 'I'll pop down here for a bit, see where it goes.' I've always done that. That has kind of been the way through the woods, really."

When Gardeners' World came up after Geoff Hamilton's death it was the second time that horticulture had come to his rescue. The first was getting his first job as an apprentice gardener, an appointment that closed off a moderately unhappy childhood that had damned him as not just short but thick.

"I did have low self-esteem, yes. I got the impression I was only there to make up the numbers. So it was a revelation when I started work. And I'll never forget that first day. It was like the great escape, getting into this nursery and being given this enormous greenhouse. 'There you are: this is yours.'"

He made it to horticultural college - his late father, a plumber, was amazed you could get qualifications in gardening, associating it with his own father's meagre life as a jobbing gardener - and on to Kew. He ventured into journalism, editing gardening books and becoming deputy editor of Amateur Gardener.

In Barnes, when he was 23 and working at Kew, he met his future wife, Alison, a games teacher. There had been girlfriends before but he thought they only went out with him because they found his shortness cute: "It's no real way to proceed is it, really?" Now, however, he was at last man-sized. Alison and he were just friends at first, mixing in the same amateur opera circle, a circle he retains today (lawyers mainly, one baker). Three years later, they married. Twenty-five years on,

their daughters, Polly and Camilla, are 20 and 18. Although Titchmarsh has a solitary side, indulged by the long mornings he spends writing in his hut or gardening, he and Alison always have lunch together. "I never," he says, "get bored with my wife. It's lovely."

Alison calmly accepts his nights on location with his "other woman", la Dimmock, and the polls that fantastically score him the sexiest man in the world after George Clooney.

Does he understand this sex-symbol lark? "I can't understand it at all. I think it's a joke everybody else is in on and is waiting to see if I take seriously."

Maybe he does. His novels frequently star fanciable middle-aged men easily mistakable for Titchmarsh alter-egos, legends in their own fleeces, their lives curious crossbreeds of the dashing and the banal. A typical sentence from The Last Lighthouse Keeper goes: "He squinted as the keen rays of the morning sun bounced off the sea, then turned and walked up the lane towards the post office." But in Titchmarsh's case the walks to the post office are strictly along the straight and narrow. A twentysomething novelist who recently spent rather longer than she meant to sitting on his knee at a publishing party assures me he is the most harmless flirt ever.

I ask the only woman in the room right now, a BBC bod, if she finds him sexy. "God," she says, "that's putting me on the spot."

"I think you have your answer," he says a little hurt.

I suggest women fantasise about him as a husband not a lover; at least he'd do the gardening. "It probably is just that pragmatic," he admits.

I mean, is any man a romantic hero in a garden centre? "Not in a garden centre but out in the garden. Yeah. A garden is one of the most romantic places."

So why shouldn't he write sex scenes if he wants to? "Yes. Why is it absurd? I ought to know more about biology than most people. Why is it odd?"

It is like those teachers of his telling him what subjects were beyond him? "Yeah, I was very aware when you were talking about me interviewing Mandela, of my hackles rising. 'Why shouldn't I have done?' If you don't make a good fist of interviewing or you're embarrassing, it's probably as well you give up. But I became aware that I could, at least, have a go. I thought I'd got over 'Sit down Titchmarsh, you're not allowed to have a go!'"

But I brought it all back? "Yes it was that really. I apologise if I got a bit ..."

So now we know why Titchmarsh risks boasting. It's better than accepting other people's underestimations. But you could not dislike him for this or, for that matter, anything else. Believe me, I've hunted for enemies. He may be insecure, but his insecurity expresses itself not in ego-mania or depression, but in a garrulous, love-me-do amiability.

"I'm writing my memoirs now and I start off by saying that sometimes I'm accused of being relentlessly cheerful, as if it's all right to be relentlessly miserable. I've got this theory that the more disturbed a life you appear to have had, or the more disgruntled you are, the more it equates with intellectual capability, and I don't think that's true."

On Monday's Ground Force he sent the dilatory Tommy to Coventry for arriving late with the wrong sort of earth. "I'm narked," he soliloquised, before replanting his tongue in his cheek. You sometimes wonder what he would really like to say, how he would phrase it, if, after so many decades of niceness, he even knows the words. He must do. His favourite authors, I note to my alarm, are Jane Austen, Alan Bennett and PG Wodehouse, writers who use language the way he uses secateurs. Rake hard enough and, beneath that flaky top soil, you may yet uncover a different Alan Titchmarsh.

Volume One of How to be a Gardener is published by the BBC at £18.99. The BBC2 series starts next Wednesday.