Titchmarsh admitted that he regularly advised viewers of his television programmes and reader of his columns to buy plants from nurseries and garden centres only when they have identified a space that needs filling.
But he said: “There are one or two shrubs that have sat sorrowfully in their containers for two years now. Why have they not been planted? Well, because I am not really sure where they should go.”
Like all gardeners, Titchmarsh said, he falls victim to impulse buying. But he has an additional problem with fellow gardeners keen to share their cuttings.
“I can’t just say, ‘no thank you – I just don’t have the room’, can I? I must make amends in this regard and go through them, planting some of them, passing on others and – yes – consigning a few of them to the compost heap,” he said.
Titchmarsh urged people to extend their horticultural spring clean beyond weeding paths and pressure-washing pavements, and to get rid of plants which have had their day.
He advised: “I know we get sentimental, but there are times when we need to grasp the nettle and have a clean sweep, rather than just snipping away at this and that, putting off the inevitable.
“So if you’ve been staring at that border for years now and finding that year-on-year it just seems to get more stagnant, for goodness’ sake take the bull by the horns and have a go at it.”
Titchmarsh tends a four-acre garden at his home in Hampshire where he lives in a Grade II-listed Georgian farmhouse.
Described as a “romantic English garden” it includes a wildflower meadow and a more formal area with a terrace and water feature.
He allowed it to be filmed for the first time in 2019, as part of an ITV programme, explaining: “It’s only now that I’ve been happy to let the cameras in. It’s here to impress me, really, and to please me and my family and to be a place I want to go out into and to be in.”
Tidying up the garden presents another problem, namely what to do with the plastic pots and trays once their contents have been planted.
Titchmarsh did not address that in his column, but Monty Don has previously advised gardeners not to throw them away.
“All seed trays, plant plugs, pots and commercial containers of every kind are plastic. The best thing gardeners can do with current plastic pots is to use and reuse them as much as possible,” he has said.
Don also advocates a less neat and tidy approach to gardening, urging people not to cut the grass but to turn the lawn into a wildflower meadow. Besides, Don said in 2021, mowing the lawn is a symbol of “controlling rather than embracing”.