Ahead of her appearance at this month’s Yeo Valley Organic Garden Festival, TV presenter and broadcaster Frances Tophill talks to Rosanna Spence about the eco-activism intrinsic to horticultural events; plants’ resilience through relentless heatwaves; how water butts can be the heroes of any city garden, patio or balcony; and her on-off relationship with flowers…
Frances Tophill chuckles when she thinks back to the early days of her gardening career. Before the television appearances, bestselling books, winning show gardens and standing-room-only festival talks, she was an apprentice tasked with picking up dog mess from immaculate lawns, being advised to spray weeds and learning the often-rigid rules of traditional horticulture.
That couldn’t be further from the gardener she is today. Now a familiar face on the nation’s favourite gardening TV programme, a multi-book author, conservationist and environmental campaigner, Frances has become one of the UK’s leading voices for a gentle, ecological approach to gardening that prizes wildlife, community and resilience as highly as beautiful borders.
Our phone line crackles its way from Bristol to rural Devon, where Frances has lived for the past 15 years and had just moved house a few days before. The signal may have dropped in and out between us, swallowed by the countryside, but her enthusiasm remained gloriously steady. Bristol, she tells me, still feels like her nearest city, having lived here herself for around a year, so she knows it well.
When asked for her favourite garden-themed spots in the city, her recommendations tumble out: The University of Bristol Botanic Garden, which she feels sometimes gets overlooked and whose research she admires; Avon Wildlife Trust’s community food-growing project in Stapleton called Feed Bristol; the welcoming and inclusive gardens based at Trinity Community Arts Centre; and the legacy of Sarah Venn, founder of Edible Bristol whose passing last year was felt by the entire gardening community. “She was incredible,” Frances says simply. “An amazing woman.”
Despite a TV presenting diary that now sends her from Sandringham to Cumbria, Coventry, Bath and beyond most weeks, the stable rhythm of gardening keeps her feeling grounded.
“I’ve still got my allotment,” she says. “What gets me into that space is probably just the calmness of it. It’s a contrast to everything else. I love being a gardener. That’s what I do this for. But it’s become harder and harder to fit additional gardening jobs around everything else.”
The people power of gardening
For now, Frances is embracing the variety that comes with a life spent often on the road, with one of the stops this month including Yeo Valley Organic Garden Festival just outside the city.
“It’s such a nice festival,” she says, reflecting on her experience last year. “I’ll be one of many people talking about the style of gardening I love – sustainable gardening, food growing, productive horticulture, community and the environment.”
Given this summer’s relentless heatwaves, she expects conversations about our changing climate to run through many of the talks. “I think a lot of people will be speaking about how we garden sustainably in a changing climate. But what people can expect is a really lovely day with really interesting people talking about amazing subjects. I’ll be listening as well.”
For Frances, these festivals are about far more than picking up gardening tips. “I feel like the gardening community is generally really lovely,” she says. “Even online [Frances started her Instagram account in 2020 and now has more than 170,000 loyal followers], I was pleasantly surprised by how kind people are.”
In an era that can often leave people feeling divided, Frances believes gardening has the potential to become a catalyst for real change in society.
“People who are in touch with the land have a really nice impact on the world. You come somewhere like Yeo Valley and everyone is respectful. There are lots of interesting opinions, but there’s a real sense of belonging.”
She pauses before landing on: “It’s almost like eco-activism.” Not the placard-waving kind, she clarifies, but something equally powerful. “We all get together and work towards the same things. You feel like your actions really do make a difference, and that’s incredibly empowering.”
Like many gardeners, Frances delights in passing plants between friends. She’s been quoted as saying: ‘One of the most generous things about gardening is how freely people share, whether it’s ideas, cuttings or encouragement.’ One such cutting has become her signature gift.
“Cretan oregano,” she says, enthusiastically. “I got the original plant from Jekka McVicar [the renowned organic gardening expert from Chew Magna who has a family-run culinary herb garden north of Bristol], and I’ve taken loads of cuttings ever since. Whenever I give someone a plant, it’s usually that one. It’s unusual and absolutely stunning.”
Sticking with this idea of generosity, I ask Frances about the best gardening advice she’s ever received that impacted the way she thinks about plants. And considering she has access to the upper echelons of the gardening gurus; she doesn’t mention an expert or television presenter. Instead, she recalls filming an episode for a national gardening programme with a wonderful foster carer in Glasgow who gardens for wildlife while supporting the children he looks after. “He just said, ‘Why do we grow this monoculture of a lawn?’”
For someone trained to maintain immaculate grass up to that point, the question stopped her in her tracks. “I’d never thought about a lawn like that before. Suddenly I realised – why not let it be dandelions and daisies and clover and moss? It stopped being a monoculture and became something really vibrant.”
It’s a reminder, she says, that sometimes the most valuable lessons come from simply questioning the assumptions we’ve always accepted.
Heated conversation
This summer has tested gardeners with heatwaves and drought. But for anyone reading The Bristol Magazine looking out onto a tired, thirsty and exhausted patch, Frances has a reassuring message.
“Plants are resilient, and even though we can’t deny they’re looking worse for wear right now, I’m hopeful the majority will recover – but they’re obviously behaving differently, shedding their leaves, crisping up, flowering and seeding early, going into sort-of dormancy,” she explains. “We know heatwaves are becoming more common, but things generally survive.” The key, she explains, is remembering that gardens work on timescales very different from our own.
“So many plants naturally die back. People often think they’ve killed something when actually it’s just doing exactly what it’s supposed to do.” Perennials disappear only to return in spring, plants set seed before fading and brown lawns can recover.
“It’s part of the cycle,” she says. “You have to get a bit philosophical about it.”
Some plants, meanwhile, have surprised even her. “Veronicastrum has been amazing,” she says. “It’s always billed as a bog plant, but I’ve seen it growing brilliantly through this drought. It’s been a real surprise.”
Looking ahead to autumn, Frances believes the priority for every gardener is water. “If you’ve run out of water this year, get another water butt. Think about water design in your garden.”
Her advice isn’t reserved for sprawling country gardens, either. City balconies, terraces and paved courtyards can all play a role. One of her favourite solutions is super simple: a water butt fed from a gutter that doubles as a tiny wildlife pond, complete with a way for creatures to climb safely back out. “It’s both a beautiful pond and a water source,” she explains. “Just collect water whenever you can for when you need it.” If space allows, she encourages gardeners to think even bigger: “Ponds and rain gardens create habitats for birds, hedgehogs, foxes, insects, frogs and newts. They can be really amazing.”
Blooming marvellous
For someone whose career began in traditional horticulture, Frances is refreshingly honest about how much her own thinking has evolved. “It’s literally U-turned multiple times,” she laughs. The early days were about neatness, control and removing anything labelled a weed.
“There was never a question about the kind of grower you wanted to be. It was just, ‘This is a weed; therefore, we get rid of it.’” Studying botany transformed that outlook. “I realised plants aren’t just pretty things that go in gardens. They have their own history. They bring people together. Community gardens completely opened my eyes.”
For a while, she went to the opposite extreme. “I decided I hated flowers,” she says with a grin I can hear. “I only liked vegetables and productive plants.”
But nature, once again, had other ideas. Building her own garden over the past four years prompted yet another change of heart. “I filled it with flowers, and I never expected I would do that.” She came to realise that flowers don’t have to serve humans to be valuable.
“They may not be edible or medicinal, but they’re full of bees and moths and butterflies and hoverflies. They have a function – it’s just not a human function, and that’s okay.”
Today, she declares jokingly: “I’m in my flower phase now.” It’s a fitting conclusion for someone who refuses to believe gardening is ever finished.
Even after decades of experience, award-winning show gardens and a national television career, Frances Tophill is still changing her mind, still learning and still allowing nature to surprise her.
Frances will appear at Yeo Valley Organic Garden Festival, which takes place 17-19 September at Yeo Valley Organic Garden (BS40 7SQ).
Book your tickets online: yvogardenfestival.co.uk
The face behind the festival
Sarah Mead is the owner of the Yeo Valley Organic Garden, a 6.5-acre Soil Association-certified organic garden in Blagdon, Somerset, 15 miles south of Bristol off the A38. Sarah runs the garden alongside the garden team and is also involved in the hospitality and marketing side of the Yeo Valley Organic brand.
She moved to Somerset more than 30 years ago, when she married Tim, and began opening the family garden to the public through the National Garden Scheme while raising four children.
The garden’s approach is strictly organic: no chemical fertilisers or pesticides are used. Sarah has described the method as taking a ‘live and let live’ approach to pests, for example, allowing natural predators such as ladybirds to manage aphid populations rather than intervening directly.
Last September, Sarah launched the first Yeo Valley Organic Garden Festival, a three-day event held at the garden. “We’d been to visit Groundswell, the regenerative farming festival, and thought – why isn’t there something like that for gardeners? Somewhere people can engage with something positive, uplifting and, most importantly, realistic – swap ideas over a cup of tea, ask daft questions, and not feel like they need to know the Latin name for everything. It felt like too big a gap to ignore.”
The first festival sold out and it returns for a second year from 17-19 September, with each day built around a different theme: Thursday (‘It’s a Gardening World’) invites many TV personalities to share views on sustainable practices; Friday (‘Colour Confidence’) celebrates design and colour in gardens with a sustainable focus; and Saturday (‘Mission Possible’) focuses on biodiversity, soil health and climate resilience. “We’d been quietly gardening organically for many years, mostly just us and the team getting on with it, and at some point, it started to feel like something we should be sharing,” Sarah explains. “The festival was really about flinging the gates open and saying – come and join us, tell us what you think, let us share what we’ve learned, and let us learn from you in turn.”
Sarah has spoken about wanting the festival to be accessible rather than expert-only: “We are determined to ditch the formalities and the ‘one size fits all’ approach to organic gardening, and provide some myth-busting, jargon-breaking, real-life practical solutions to suit every garden and every budget.”
“My dream is to create a gathering where garden lovers, from newbies to pros, can exchange experiences and swap tips about a better way to garden.”
yeovalley.co.uk | Image of Sarah below by Jonathan Buckley
