In the original dust jacket. Green cloth binding with silver title on the spine.

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This is the story of the life of Geoff Hamilton, best known as presenter of “Gardeners’ World”. With contributions from his many gardening friends and shared memories provided by Tony Hamilton and Gay Search, it traces Geoff’s career from horticultural college to television personality.

Reviews:

• • The sudden death in 1996 of Geoff Hamilton, popular presenter for 17 years of the BBC television “Gardeners’ World”, came as a devastating blow to his viewers and admirers. His colleague Gay Search says that many people told her it was as though they had lost a member of their own family. What was he like, this gardening Everyman, to inspire such affection and devotion? His story is told in Geoff Hamilton: A Man and His Garden, on which Gay Search has collaborated with Hamilton’s identical twin brother Tony. It’s an unexceptional life in many ways–National Service, agricultural college, struggling landscaping businesses, then the break into journalism and television. Hamilton’s secret, it seems, was that he had no secret. A devoted, hard-working gardener and family man, he communicated directly with his viewers and readers, never talking down, sharing his skills and discoveries (most notably the use of Chinese take-away trays for seedlings) with enormous enthusiasm. He did it all himself and was entirely self-made: his television garden was his own garden. Gay Search has researched his life thoroughly, talking to family and friends to build up a warm, sympathetic portrait of this admirable man and gardener, whose great fortune was that, by dint of hard work and the right sort of luck, he was able to live a life he loved. —Robin Davidson

• Sure to make you laugh out loud bring a smile to your face and occasionally, a tear to your eye. — Guardian Weekend

• For the man who was to become the nation’s most popular gardener, a two-up, two-down in Tollet Street, just off the Mile End Road in London’s East End, was a rather unlikely birth-place. Geoffrey Stephen Hamilton was born on 15 August 1936, three years after his older brother, Barry Mark, and thirty-five minutes before his identical twin Anthony George the thirty-five minutes, as Tony says with a wry smile, that shaped the whole course of their lives. If you’re the older one when you’re a kid, it gives you one great asset: it gives you power. Geoff subtly but unstintingly exerted his dominance over Tony right up until the day he died. The earliest memory Tony has of Geoff is of them lying together in the big double pram in the hall-way where they were put to sleep for part of the day, and Geoff sitting up, grabbing his brother’s hair, pulling a chunk out, waving it around and shouting gleefully, Dot sum!