BARNSDALE at 40

Enjoy a fresh look at this iconic garden as it celebrates its 40th birthday, and find out what makes it still so special today

Barnsdale Gardens, on an eight-acre site in Rutland, were for many years the home of BBC Gardeners' World. Before Monty's Longmedow, Berryfields or even Alan's Barleywood, Geoff Hamilton presented the show here from 1983, moving up from a smaller site. Made up of 38 individual gardens, the site sought to educate and inspire visitors, sharing its organic and peat-free principles, as it still does today.

"Geoff decided to go peat-free 30 years ago," explains his son Nick Hamilton, who has been running the garden since his father passed away 27 years ago. "He was far ahead of his time and understood the problem with the decimation of peat bogs. He promoted it vigorously without being rude to people."

The garden is also organic, and has been since Geoff's time, "He was the first person on TV talking about organic gardening... He would always mention the organic way of doing it first, so it was forefront in the viewer's mind." But this wasn't always popular, Nick points out: "He upset an awful lot of people when he decided to garden this way, because the pesticide industry was so massive. But he realised this was the way we needed to go."

For Nick, growing in harmony with nature is still hugely important. Over the years he has seen that those who shared his father's principles are having their concerns and values better recognised. "King Charles is a prime example," he tells us, "When he was a young man, the papers absolutely ridiculed him for the environmental things he said, but roll on 40 years and they suddenly realised he was absolutely right."

Growing and evolving