Gardeners In The News:
Mandela’s garden gets a TV makeover
By Paul McCann, Media Correspondent, The Times
Down the garden path: Mr Mandela returned home to find Alan Titchmarsh, Charlie Dimmock and, right, Tommy Walsh from Ground Force. Photograph: BBC
THEY are the famous team of surprise visitors who like to sneak in and rearrange gardens while the owners are away. But the latest target of the BBC’s Ground Force was a little beyond their usual patch. He was one Nelson Mandela, of the Eastern Cape.
When the statesman returned home last weekend and was confronted with the garden they had created, he had no idea who Charlie Dimmock and Alan Titchmarsh were. But South Africa’s former President courteously remarked that the famously bra-less Ms Dimmock looked like one of the Spice Girls. In the past, Mr Mandela has said that meeting the Spice Girls was one of the greatest days of his life.
It had taken the BBC six months of talks with Mr Mandela’s security detail and his wife, Graça Machel, to be allowed access to the garden at his retirement home in Qunu. Ms Machel was sent videos of other Ground Force exploits.
The idea of a make-over on Mr Mandela’s garden came from a South African-born producer working on the programme. “We were asked by the BBC to find someone really special for the millennium show,” said Carol Haslam, executive producer. “The problem is that if you did any kind of well-heeled star, viewers might think, ‘Why are they getting all this work done for free – they can afford their own garden designers?’ We knew we would not have that problem with Nelson Mandela.”
While Mr Mandela, 81, was on a trip to New York at the weekend, the gardening team installed a pergola, a water feature, slate paving and bedding plants in a small patch of garden overlooked by his private study. When Mr Mandela saw the new garden, he professed himself delighted.
Mr Titchmarsh, who designed the new garden, said yesterday: “Nelson Mandela is one of the world’s most inspirational figures. His struggle has been a lesson to us all, and I was particularly struck reading in his memoirs how important gardening became during his imprisonment.”
When Mr Mandela was imprisoned on Robben Island one of his few pleasures was tending his own small garden in the prison yard where he grew tomatoes and vegetables. It was, he has said, one of the few things in prison that he could control.
“The sense of being the custodian of this small patch of earth offered a small taste of freedom,” Mr Mandela wrote in his memoirs. “I saw the garden as a metaphor for certain aspects of my life. A leader must also tend his garden; he, too, sows seeds, and then watches, cultivates and harvests the result.”
Mr Mandela’s garden features in the millennium episode of Ground Force on January 2. During the programme, the team see the prison garden he created on Robben Island.
The garden that the team took on was bare turf round a new home that the former African National Congress leader has just had built. Mr Mandela invited his television gardeners to stay for tea after seeing his garden and read to them the passage on gardening from his book. “He seemed delighted,” added Mr Titchmarsh. “But rather poignantly, he said that he just hoped that he had enough time to enjoy it.”
The programme-makers were assisted in setting up the secret transformation by one of Mr Mandela’s closest friends, Ahmed Kathrada, who was a political prisoner with Mr Mandela during the apartheid era and knew of his love of gardening from their prison days.
Mr Mandela was surprised at his wife’s involvement in the secrecy. When he saw the garden, he said to her: “We’re not supposed to have any secrets.”
NOTE: If you are lucky enough to live in England, watch for the special episode of Ground Force on BBC in January.