Hortobiography by Carol Klein: The day I hit the BBC’s ‘grass-ceiling’
Hortobiography by Carol Klein (Ebury £22, 322pp)
When Monty Don stepped back from presenting Gardeners’ World in 2008 because of ill health, many viewers assumed Carol Klein would take over as lead presenter.
Hugely knowledgeable, an award-winning plantswoman and a TV natural, there was surely no better fit for the nation’s favourite gardening programme.
The BBC, shamefully, drew up an all-male shortlist for the job.
Responding to the outcry at being overlooked, Klein commented wittily that she had clearly hit the corporation’s ‘grass ceiling’.
This warm, gently meandering autobiography – interspersed with plenty of horticultural wisdom – shows that she has survived quite a few setbacks in her life.
Growing up in and around Manchester, Klein had a tough childhood. Her father, a civil servant, spent a year in prison for fraud and, as a result, Klein lost her scholarship to the school she was attending. She adored her mother, but her father could be violent.
Once, when they were out on a walk and he thought she was talking too much, he ‘dealt me an adult-sized smack on my head, knocking me into the ditch’.
From an early age, Klein had a special affinity with plants. Although the family home had an inside toilet, she liked to use the outside one because there was a deliciously fragrant Daphne mezereum planted next to it.
When she had to write an essay on ‘My Way to School’, she listed not only the houses she passed but also what was growing in the front gardens.
Passion for plants: Carol Klein
Klein went to art college and then became a teacher. She had a tendency to fall for unsuitable men and was not sure if teaching was what she wanted to do.
One night, ‘distraught and desperate’, Klein tried to kill herself with an overdose. But fortunately a friend found her in time.
In 1978, she and her husband Neil (who sounds completely splendid) settled in Devon and bought Glebe Cottage, which came with an acre of rough grass, weeds and brambles. Creating a garden there, the first proper one she’d ever had, transformed her life. ‘As much as I made this garden, this garden made me,’ she writes.
She discovered she had a knack for propagating plants and started selling them at country markets before creating her own nursery, while also raising her two daughters. Soon she began exhibiting at RHS shows and then was asked to design a garden at the Chelsea Flower Show.
Opener: Carol opens the RHS Garden Bridgewater
Before long, a TV producer spotted her potential and she got a job presenting the Channel Four show Real Gardens.
Klein first appeared on Gardeners’ World in 1989 when the late, great Geoff Hamilton did a feature on Glebe Cottage.
She was so keen to make a good impression on him that she suppressed all her natural enthusiasm, coming over as ‘lucid but humourless … not a single smile crossed my lips.’
Klein has been one of the presenters on Gardeners’ World since 2005 and is no longer afraid to be herself on screen, although she has had to learn to rein in her tendency to overuse the word ‘wonderful’.
Regular viewers will recognise the trademark Klein noise of approval – a cross between a gurgle and a chuckle, when she sees a plant that she particularly loves.
She writes that she has no desire to be on television for the sake of it; she does it to share her love of plants with other people.
Klein, now aged 79, had breast cancer at the beginning of this year. However, even after a double mastectomy, she was back at work a few weeks later, bubbling with delight over the floral marquee at the Chelsea Flower Show.
Gardening, she says, ‘is a necessity rather than a luxury. It is part of me; it is what I do and who I am.’
Long may she flourish.