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While the Soil Association and other such organisations were getting established others were doing the same. As it grew people joined in either getting in on it, or opposing it. Among those who opposed it, obviously, were the manufacturers of artificial fertilisers and those who were making money from them.

Among those who got in on the act, were supermarkets and food manufacturers. But with them it was only a sideline and a very small one at that together with their conventional produce. As most people buy their food in supermarkets, when they had money they bought, what to them, were luxury foods, only to stop doing so when money was short. In other words they were not from conviction trying to follow an organic lifestyle.

But others did adopt the Organic Lifestyle, following in the footsteps of the presenters of the BBC’s flagship gardening programme Gardeners’ World.

The person who really introduced it to the general public via Gardeners’ World was Geoff Hamilton, who joined the programme in 1979. He with his twin brother Tony attended an Agricultural College with Geoff opening a Gardening Center after qualifying.

He started his TV career with one of our independent TV channels. The BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation), is semi official and is funded by a licence fee, whereas the independent ones are funded by advertisements. This was in 1975 and while he was there was asked to make a guest appearance on Gardeners’ World. He was offered the job of presenter in 1979.

Each presenter chooses his own place from which to film, with Geoff it was Barnsdale. At the time he the guest appearance on Gardeners’ World he was living in a house attached to the stable block on the Barnsdale Hall estate and had begun renting a couple of acres of land at the top of the hill. But after joining Gardeners’ World he realised that there wasn’t enough room to experiment, so he began to look for a suitable alternative. In 1984 he found it, just one mile up the road a Victorian farmhouse with over 5 acres of land, ‘Barnsdale’ was born! All but half an acre was pasture – he was like a child with a new toy!

Two years later Gardeners’ World was well established in its new home with Geoff’s natural and down to earth style making him a hit with the viewers. He died in 1996 while still the Presenter of Gardeners’ World. In 2000 was voted the nation’s all-time favourite gardener and Gardener of the Millennium by the Readers of Amateur Gardening magazine. He took 70% of the 1,200-plus votes cast in a phone and magazine poll.

By this time the Presenter was Alan Titmarsh, who was asked to take over when Geoff Hamilton died. He left school at 15 to become an apprentice gardener in a local nursery. He went on to train at agricultural college and at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Alan won a gold medal at the Chelsea Flower Show in 1995 for a country kitchen garden.

Alan became a horticultural journalist, first as an assistant editor of gardening books, then as Deputy Editor of Amateur Gardening magazine. He is now a freelance broadcaster and writer.

He has twice been named Gardening Writer of the Year, and was voted Television Personality Of The Year four years in a row by the Garden Writers Guild. He writes regularly in BBC Gardeners’ World Magazine, Daily Express and Sunday Express.

Alan has written more than 40 gardening books, including one of the all-time fastest sellers How to be a Gardener. He also writes novels. He also presented Ground Force, in which he, Charlie Dimmock and Tommy Walsh, did over the garden of an individual after being asked to do so by their husband/wife/friend. The whole basis was that it had to be a surprise to the person who had been nominated, so they had to be go away for the 3 days it took. Among those surprised was Nelson Mandela.

He stopped presenting Garderners’ World in 2002, but is still very active with other programmes on the BBC. Including: British Isles: A Natural History, and The Gardener’s Year. Alan continues to present the BBC’s coverage of the RHS Chelsea Flower show, which he has done since 1983.

He presented the programme from his home Barleywood, which he told Leigh Mytton, who interviewed him shortly after he left Gardeners’ World, he was leaving. He said he was staying in the area, but didn’t say where he would be moving to.

He was replaced by Monty Don. With him a new system was tried, i.e. he and the other presenters worked on, not his own garden, but on a a run down one in the Midlands called Berryfields, which is managed by someone else on a daily basis, with Monty and the other presenters, Joe Swift and Carol Klein visiting it. We are also shown what Carol is doing in her garden and that of a young couple who have asked for her help and are prepared to share their garden with us. And we have been introduced to the other people who are working in a Allotment that Joe Swift has recently acquired in London, where he lives. We have also been introduced to his family, who help him with it.

Monty Don, who, as you were told above, replaced Alan Titchmarsh as the presenter of BBC Two’s Gardeners’ World in 2002. He was 47, and had formerly been gardening expert on ITV1’s This Morning and presenter of Channel 4’s Real Gardens.

At the time Alan Titchmarsh said: “I’ve had a wonderful seven years presenting Gardeners’ World and I wish Monty Don every success in taking over.” He was the unanimous choice to do so.

Monty discovered his passion for gardening after a successful career as a jewellery designer. Before becoming the face of Gardeners’ World he appeared on a range of programmes including This Morning, Real Gardens, Lost Gardens, Fork to Fork and Don Roaming. He said that it was Geoff Hamilton who awoke his passion for organic gardening. Each presenter has his/hers speciality and Monty’s is fruit and vegetables. Which brings us back to the Soil Association, which he is now President of.

He stepped down as the main presenter of the BBC’s Gardeners’ World in April as a result of a minor stroke, and postponed taking up his role as the new president of the Soil Association. On his doctor’s advice he took “gardening leave” and has spent the summer “pottering” about at home or on his farm in the Black Mountains, and enjoying 12-hour sleeps, jettisoning the old workaholic regime of rising at 4.30am.

“I originally took six weeks off and at the end of six weeks I knew that I didn’t really want to start work again this year,” he says. Despite the occasional problem with his balance, he says he now feels no side effects of his stroke. A daily aspirin tablet to thin the blood, a weekly appointment with an acupuncturist and, of course, the tranquillity of his garden and the bosom of his family have helped him to recover from the dark days in February when he thought he was dying, asking his wife, Sarah, to hold him as he lay stricken in bed.

Being forced to confront his own mortality has left him reappraising his life’s direction. “I’d always planned to leave Gardeners’ World at the end of next year so I just thought, OK, I’ll bring it forward by a year. I had become entrapped by it in a way that took me ages to realise.”

Spending a year, as he did in 2007, visiting 80 of the world’s most arresting gardens for a BBC2 series sounds like a dream assignment to most, but it is evident that Don now views the stress of the 12-hour days and endless travel as a pivotal cause of his build-up of stress. Twice-weekly visits to Berryfields, where most of the filming for Gardeners’ World takes place, also took their toll.

Beyond the day-to-day stewardship of his garden and farm, Don now seems focused on his new role as president of the Soil Association. Next week, he will officially take up the post by handing out the rosettes at its annual food awards. But as he displayed at this year’s Hay festival, when he entered head-first into the vexed should-we-buy-food-flown-in-from-abroad debate by saying that “maybe third-world countries will have to suffer as a result of our national food policy”, he sees the brief of his new role as being a high-profile campaigner arguing for a wholesale change to the global food system. He intends to start doing this by rousing Britain’s 11 million gardeners into growing as much of their own food as they can.

We are now back to the Soil Association, so let us look at its history up to the present day In the 2000s they commented on:

Foot and mouth

In 2001 the disease devastated the UK livestock industry. The Soil Association challenged the government policy of mass slaughter, recommending voluntary and selective vaccination instead. This position was rejected at the time, but it is now official policy throughout Europe to tackle any future outbreaks.

Sustainable development

The 2001 Soil Association report Myth and Reality states, ‘There is already enough food to feed the world. Hunger will be alleviated when poverty is alleviated. Intensive farming destroys the fertility of the land and is unsustainable. Organic methods help labour-rich but cash-poor communities to produce food sustainability.’

In 2005, the head of Ethiopia’s Environmental Protection Agency, Dr Tewolde Berhan, endorses organic farming as the sustainable, practical way to feed the world, “In a harsh-climate and a largely agricultural economy we need to rediscover an approach to agriculture which supports long-term food security and protects soil fertility. Organic farming is the way forward for Ethiopia.”

Which is the opposite to what those on the other side of the debate say. The thing to bear in mind with all of this is that everyone is biased and has a world view into which they try to fit everything. Many of these people claim they are scientific and accuse those who disagree with them of being unscientific. But much of their ’science’ has to do with the past which is outside the realms of science. The word Science is derived from the Greek word for knowledge. It has come to mean knowledge of the physical world, but this makes no difference, as we can only have knowledge of what exists now, not what existed in the past.