Horticulture’s nicest practitioner on his journey from sweeping playgrounds to Gardeners’ Question Time via offering gardening advice to insomniacs
WORDS ZIA ALLAWAY PORTRAIT RACHEL WARNE
Meeting Matthew Biggs, it’s easy to forget that you’re in the company of one of Britain’s most celebrated gardening broadcasters and authors. His broad smile, warmth and humility explain how he has endeared himself to a nation of gardeners for more than 30 years. Best known for his appearances on Radio 4’s Gardeners’ Question Time and TV shows such as Channel 4’s Garden Club, Matthew has also worked as a toilet cleaner, jobbing gardener, television director, author and RHS judge. He says that this eclectic range of jobs has led to him “careering through life, ducking and diving to keep a roof over my head, and saying ‘yes’ to everything that sounded interesting or fun, then worrying about it afterwards”.
Born in Leicester in 1960, Matthew is one of three siblings. “We had a strict upbringing,” he says. “But my father regularly took the family on country walks and helped to inspire my interest in plants. He loved the open air, the beauty of nature, and of art, which has been my other life-long passion.”
After leaving school at 16 with a handful of O levels, he worked as a clerk for Leicester City Council before the lure of gardening took him in a different direction. “I went to the careers office and looked up jobs in horticulture. There weren’t many opportunities, to be honest, but I signed on for a course in Ornamental Horticulture at Pershore College. However, I needed practical experience, so before going to college, I worked as a gardener at the local parks department for a year, which mainly involved sweeping playgrounds and cleaning toilets.”
On graduating from Pershore, Matthew found it difficult to get a job. “I have mild cerebral palsy and a weakness on my left side causes me to limp, which probably put people off in those less-enlightened times.” Undeterred, he went back to work for the council before applying for a diploma course at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, where he won a prize for the Best Student Lecture and another for his thesis on Plants in Medicine. After his studies, he worked at Kew as a visitors’ guide and staff training officer. During this time, he admits to locking himself in Kew’s Economic Botany Collection so that he had the place to himself, and spent many happy hours delving into Kew’s unique collections and amassing the encyclopaedic knowledge for which fans of Gardeners’ Questi
