super grass

She bathes in popcorn, has a famous giggle and her green fingers give men sweaty palms. Meet Charlie Dimmock, the glam gardener who has taken root on your TV

IT WAS raining when Charlie Dimmock was in Glasgow recently, which will not come as a surprise to anyone who regularly watches Ground Force, the gardening programme which has made her famous. In fact it seems to rain in every second episode of the programme, which pleases the thousands of men of a certain age who have absolutely no interest in herbaceous borders but who tune in religiously every week.

There is just one reason for their devotion and her name is Charlie Dimmock. And there is just one reason why Charlie Dimmock appears with unremitting regularity in newspapers and magazines and, rather less often, TV chat shows while Carole Baxter from the Beechgrove Garden does not. It has nothing to do with her green fingers. Charlie Dimmock is loved not for what she does but for what she does not do. And what she does not do, famously, is wear a bra.

Which is why she has recently been photographed for various newspapers in a bath full of popcorn and been crowned Giggler of the Year, although the connection between laughing and eating is at best tenuous. It is also why, frankly, we are talking today. Charlie has written a book called the Water Garden Workbook which is full of great ideas for building beautiful ponds, complete with fountain, in the untamed jungle outside your back door. But, let's face it, when you are sitting across from Charlie Dimmock the last thing you are going to talk about is the relative merits of a modern canal and a small rocky cascade. Instead, you are going to talk about how it feels to be lusted after by thousands of men you have never met and who can get more than slightly obsessive. Some of the less inhibited websites set up by her more dedicated fans, gave her and her long- standing partner a bit of a surprise.

"My boyfriend has just bought a TV. We didn't have one before but I just came home and there was one in the house. I haven't been about much so he was bored. He's going through a toy phase at the moment, gadgets, that kind of thing. He is on the net but he wouldn't pay to see me naked. Isn't that terrible?" Has she ever looked at those sites dedicated to her? "Yes, but not recently." She giggles.

"It is weird. People pay money to set up a site. What are they doing? It is flattering but you don't think about it. We did sit there once, and wanted to see a film on one of my sites and tried to download it. We sat there for 20 minutes waiting for it to download but the disc wasn't quite big enough so we didn't see any of it."

I tell her that her fan club page had moved in April and since then 34,000 people had visited it. "That was me. Every night. But really, the only thing I do find slightly frightening ... well not frightening but you start thinking 'Oh no' ... is at the end of one it says 'if you are a member of Charlie's family or a friend write in and tell what you know'. You think, Oh God, those college days ... uh oh. We've all done things at college that we wouldn't like to be printed again."

College was in Somerset and Wiltshire, where she studied horticulture. Despite her new starry status, Charlie is not one of those celebrity presenters recently attacked by gardening guru Stefan Buczacki. He was thinking about Kim Wilde, who landed a job on an upcoming series after doing an evening class in landscaping. That is not Charlie's style. She still works three days a week as manager of the Mill Water Gardens Garden Centre in Romsey in Hampshire. She can't quite believe all this celebrity stuff isn't going to end tomorrow.

"I never really thought about a career in television. I still haven't thought about a career in television. I don't want to stop working at the garden centre because this might all stop tomorrow. It's quite difficult balancing everything. I just leave long lists for everyone of things to do. I go in most evenings when I'm back home to see what's happened and readjust the list."

If she feels it's difficult having a day job which makes her so accessible to the public, she isn't saying. "It has," she admits, "got a bit busier. They don't harass me but you feel a bit silly when you're pulling the trolley with plants on it and you've got about eight people watching you just walk along."

Her first TV appearance was on a regional show called Grass Roots, when she was called upon to show her expertise with water features. "A researcher came down from that programme and got me to do a little three minute slot. Six years later they came back. I must have made some kind of impression, but what kind I'm not sure. Either that or they had gone through their diary and couldn't find anyone else to do it. It was a Saturday afternoon, it was bedlam and they asked me if I wanted to do a screen test. I thought it was my boyfriend trying to wind me up."

Anyway, the screen test must have been a success because Charlie was soon wheeling her wheelbarrow through gardens broad and narrow in Ground Force and a cult was born. She is, however, adamant that the no-bra Dimmock gimmick wasn't calculated in any way, shape or form.

"I've not worn a bra for work for ..." - she pretends to try and remember - "I just never have. The BBC have never asked me to wear a skimpy T-shirt or anything else. They buy me T-shirts but they are never short or see through. And I have actually worn a bra on several programmes but no one seems to comment on that. I don't think the BBC have gone out their way to make it a selling point."

Apart, obviously, from the Radio Times cover in which she appeared as Boticelli's Venus, with branches and leaves strategically placed to avoid any embarrassment. She giggles again. "I wore a bodystocking for that one. That was the first photo shoot I had ever done. I was just gobsmacked by the number of people there. I was expecting just one photographer.

''It was embarrassing when I went into the local newsagents, although normally they do point out which magazines I'm in. My mother is in PR and she suggested I pay for a cuttings service to send me everything that's written about me. But I said, get real. That would be extortionate at the moment."

Charlie's mother, Sue Kennedy, has become quite famous herself recently, thanks to a recent newspaper article featuring her posing in a wet T-shirt for a charity calendar. And no, she wasn't wearing a bra either. "It was the first of those things like the Women's Institute get their kit off or whatever. Our local pub always had the Pirelli calendar up and they have a huge collection of them and that year all the girls had been really, really skinny. And they looked fantastic and my mum thought, we could do that. She convinced local women to do a calendar and they all said they would do it for free. Some of them originally thought it was great but when it got underway they backtracked. I did say to my mum that I didn't mind doing it. This was before I had even started filming Ground Force, so I'm just so glad I didn't go through with it."

Charlie's mum and her merchant seaman father gave her a fairly unconventional upbringing before separating, amicably, when she was 16. But it was her grandparents who got her interested in gardening. Her grandfather was a landscape gardener. "My dad was away a lot and my mother was working so I spent a lot of time with my grandparents. We used to have a big vegetable patch. I started working at the garden centre when I was 15, just for the money, a Saturday job. I had always been slightly interested but then there's that gap, when you're 15 or 16, when gardening isn't exactly the be all and end all.

"I went to college and started doing doing A-levels, dropped out and as soon as I dropped out realised I should be doing some sort of education. I went back to college and it just went from there."

When she joined Alan Titchmarsh and Tommy Walsh on Ground Force no one really expected the show to take off. It's a sort of Changing Rooms with grass, in which our three heroes are given two days to transform a garden while the owner is blissfully unaware of what's going on. Usually they are quite pleased with the results, although you live in hope of someone throwing their hands up in horror and demanding their nettles back.

Charlie's role is pretty physical. She lugs things around, does her stuff with water features and gives Walsh a hard time while the camera crew seek out the best angles to show off her usually bra-less chest. She's pretty much one of the lads, both on and off camera. So much so that her drinking exploits are almost as famous as her figure, although I'm not supposed to mention that.

"Here we go," she says when I mention her reputation for sinking them back. "It doesn't get bad any more. Apparently we've got more professional and realise we must go to bed at 12 o'clock." Is that because someone's telling you to do that? "No. When we filmed the first series we only did eight, so it was spread out much more. If you don't see someone for a while you tend to sit up talking about what's happened over the last three weeks and you start drinking but we're much better now."

Sometimes it's tough being in the public eye and some of the things written about Charlie Dimmock must make her feel very odd indeed. Journalist AA Gill, for instance, was moved to wax particularly lyrical. "Alan Titchmarsh is, in gardening terms, a seedless satsuma, if you get my drift, whereas Charlie should have the seed packet instructions tattooed on her bottom: 'hardy annual, doesn't need much attention. Good in shady spot. Keep moist and tie to stiff post'."

Does she read this stuff? "I don't read everything. I just rush and look at the photos to see how terrible they are. Typical girlie thing - don't read what it says, just look at the picture. Someone did read that particular piece out to me. I suppose it's flattering really." She pauses to weigh it up. "It is and it isn't."

Women journalists have been less kind, some suggesting that male reaction to her role in the programme is not exactly a ground force for feminism. "I'm a fairly normal woman," she says. "I like to be flattered. I like people holding the door open for me. But I really hate it if someone does something for me that I can do on my own. Like, Tommy will come along and go, let me lift that for you. No you won't, I can do it myself thank you. But it doesn't annoy me when people write these things. I tend to think, well, there's obviously nothing much going on to write about if they have to write about me."

But what can her boyfriend, who knew her long before the TV gig came up, think about all her celebrity? "He's all right about it. Parts of it he likes. Parts of it he doesn't. It was all a bit of a shock."

But Charlie knows that her celebrity isn't really the sort which will last indefinitely. She slightly resents the fact that it takes her away from her, I hesitate to say roots, but certainly her main career.

''It does take me away from gardening a bit but so far it's been fun. Gardening is still more appealing. Some parts of TV work is a bit daunting, the technical side of things. People like Alan and Gaby Roslin are very professional, particularly what they do with camera angles. Whereas with me I'm doing something and being filmed rather than presenting."

Would she like to present?

"No. That's what I find horrifying."

But she's giving it a go anyway, with a new series, Charlie's Gardening Army, which she's filming now. It's another makeover programme, although more to do with communities rather than the families features in Ground Force. She'd rather it sneaked on to TV with the minimum of fuss but she knows that won't happen. There will be the media launches, photo shoots, maybe more baths filled with popcorn. She also knows it would be churlish to complain.

"If this all stops tomorrow, I would say I had an opportunity that most people have never had. I've been lucky, I've had good fun, I've enjoyed it, had a laugh. And something else will happen." And you know she won't complain about that either

Copyright 1999
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