Knave of Spades: Growing Pains of a Gardener

Alan Titchmarsh

Mar 2012 · Hodder & Stoughton · Narrated by Peter Wickham

About this audiobook

When Alan left school at fifteen little was expected of him. An 'O' level in art is not the most obvious passport to success, but in the ancient greenhouses of the local nursery Mrs T's little lad found his spiritual home, learning his trade and the strange ways of human nature.

But the comfort and familiarity of his home in the Yorkshire Dales would soon be left behind as he journeyed south to college and then to Kew Gardens where he encountered rare plants collected by Captain Cook and a varied assortment of eccentrics in the world's most famous garden.

Spells as a teacher and editor followed, until fate took a hand when he landed a job on BBC's Nationwide as their gardening presenter. His childhood dream of inheriting the mantle of gardening god Percy Thrower was beginning to come true...

From the first faltering steps in radio and television, to a career in broadcasting and writing, Knave of Spades is a wonderfully warm and self-deprecatingly honest memoir. Alan Titchmarsh shows us just why he has become not only our favourite gardener, but a popular writer and broadcaster too.

(P)2010 Oakhill Publishing

About the author

Alan Titchmarsh is known to millions through the popular BBC TV programmes British Isles: A Natural History, How to be a Gardener, Ground Force and Gardeners` World. But he started out in far humbler beginnings, in a rural childhood on the edge of Ilkley Moor in Yorkshire.
After a spell at Kew he became a horticultural journalist, as an Editor of gardening magazines, before becoming a freelance broadcaster and writer.
He has twice been named `Gardening Writer of the Year` and for four successive years was voted `Television Personality of the Year` by the Garden Writers` Guild. In 2004 he received their Lifetime Achievement Award.
Alan has appeared on radio and television both as a gardening expert and as an interviewer and presenter, fronting such programmes as Points of View, Pebble Mill, Songs of Praise, Titchmarsh`s Travels and Ask the Family, and since 1983 has presented the BBC`s annual coverage of The Chelsea Flower Show. He now has his own daytime TV show on ITV, The Alan Titchmarsh Show. Alan has written more than forty gardening books, as well as seven best-selling novels, including his 2008 success, Folly, which have all made the Sunday Times Bestsellers List. Alan has published three volumes of memoirs; Trowel and Error sold over 200,000 copies in hardback when published in 2002, and Nobbut A Lad, about his Yorkshire childhood, was published in October 2006 with similar success, and his third volume of memoir Knave of Spadeswas a Sunday Times bestseller.
He was made MBE in the millennium New Year Honours list and holds the Victoria Medal of Honour, the Royal Horticultural Society`s highest award. He lives with his wife and a menagerie of animals in Hampshire where he gardens organically.