Hanging garden from Ireland wows visitors

BBC presenter Joe Swift is nervous about the prospect of coming under scrutiny at this year’s Chelsea Flower Show with his own garden, he has confessed.

Swift, 46, decided last year to “have a go myself” after presenting telly coverage of the show for years.

He began filling his garden with trees he scoured from Germany, stone from a quarry in Yorkshire and selected shrubs from southern Spain this week.

Swift, who is not allowed to do any TV presenting this year because he is designing the garden for Homebase, told the Radio Times he expected criticism of his creation, which he first started work on in June last year.

“Things are going to be a lot different for me this year at Chelsea because I’m the BBC and RHS (Royal Horticultural Society) rules have tightened up, and don’t allow anyone to have a foot in both sides of the camp, so to speak,” he said.

“Am I nervous about what people are going to think? Definitely,” the presenter, best known for Gardeners’ World and the Chelsea Flower Show, admitted.

“This is a project that has taken up a lot of time and a lot of money. The average spend on a Chelsea garden design last year, for example, was £190,000.”

Swift, whose Homebase garden is themed around the DIY chain’s charity the Teenage Cancer Trust, added: “I’m a garden critic and commentator myself, so I’ve got to expect people to pass judgment on my garden... and, after all this work, the most important thing to me is actually that I should like it!”