Klein probably should have been Britain's first female 'head gardener', but was never given the role as lead presenter on BBC TV's Gardeners' World, despite her expertise and popularity.
After half a book describing the run-up to her gardening career, on p269 the former Glebe Cottage Nursery owner gets to Gardeners' World presenter Monty Don's 2008 stroke, which led to her stepping in as lead presenter on the BBC show from March-September. She reports that Matthew Wilson, Andy Sturgeon and Toby Buckland were then auditioned for the full-time role. "They were all men", writes Klein. "Television can be a cruel game." Buckland got the job until Monty came back in 2010.
Often described as "down-to-earth" in comparison to long-time leading garden TV presenter Don's more rarefied approach, she claims she is happier meeting growers than being the 'link man' for the show, on which she has appeared regularly for more than 20 years.
Hitting the 'grass ceiling' as a TV presenter has not stopped her appearing on more than a dozen gardening TV series, exploring her infectious passion for plants built up as a hardworking nurserywoman in a second career that took off in her forties.
In 2023, the RHS gave her a 'horticultural hero' award. Asked then whether she thinks there will ever be a female lead presenter on BBC Gardeners' World, she said: "I can't see why there hasn't been one already. There's a bit of a grass ceiling when it comes to women making it."
Gritty, hardy annual, down the earth: there's lots of gardening terms that fit Klein. She's real and time-served and has followed the dream of many, changing careers after 13 years as an art teacher to develop a nursery (and then a TV career) while bringing up the kids (she has two 40-something daughters). She's keen to say there was no plan, and her honesty is another asset.
Reflecting gardening's core demographic of older women, less starchy than the likes of Percy Thrower and less precious than Monty, Klein has always been approachable and relatable. Her infectious enthusiasm made her probably the UK’s leading TV plantsperson of the early part of the 21st century. It was her background as a nurserywoman gave her the knowledge that she effortlessly broadcasts.
Her autobiography, titled Hortobiography, recounts a night she spent sitting fully clothed in a bath discussing art with John Lennon just months before the first Beatles album was released; tales of hitchhiking across Europe, and the time she made history by being the first person to raise a case under the Sex Discrimination Act when it was introduced in 1975, enraged that she had been passed over for promotion in favour of a less-qualified man.
The story in the book about having a bath with Lennon as a 15 year old out on the town in Manchester is so bizarre it must be true. "In Manchester's Oasis Club in 1961 and I was 15 or 16. The place was so crowded and music so loud we retired to the bathroom and sat in the bath to chat about all sorts of things, mainly art."
She attended Worsley Wardley Grammar School but left when she was 15 and worked as a retail assistant at the Kendal Milne department store in Manchester and statistician at the British Insulated Callender’s Cables near Wigan. Her father ran a TV shop in Walkden.
In the early 1960s, she studied at art school in Swansea and Brighton, then made the switch into teaching, spending part of her career, To Sir With Love-style in the East End of London and Shepherd’s Bush.
An early marriage that was quickly dissolved. In 1971 at a Communist Party meeting in Hampstead, she met Neil Klein, who she dated on and off. However when they left a party together a year later, she says: “We walked and walked and when we opened the door to my flat it opened the door to the rest of my life.”
Upon moving to Devon in 1978, she taught art at the North Devon College and South Molton secondary school and community college.
Finally finding her passion (she loved plants as a child), she established a plant nursery at Glebe Cottage at Chittlehamholt, near Umberleigh in Devon, initially giving up teaching after 13 years to look after the children and gradually taking her passion for plants out to plant fairs. She never had any formal horticultural training but learnt from the likes of Christoper Lloyd, Valerie Finnis and John Massey. For the next two decades, growing, selling and showing plants became a way of life. She cites creating 272 exhibits at flower shows and began exhibiting at the annual Chelsea Flower Show in 1990, where the nursery won six gold medals over the years.
Klein first appeared on Gardeners’ World in 1989 when Geoff Hamilton featured Glebe Cottage. Her first presenting role was in the Channel 4 series Garden Party in 1996 after being spotted by a producer at a garden show.
Her 2006 Grow Your Own Veg TV series came from nowhere - she's known for her perennials, but hit the zeitgeist with self-sufficiency. Her 1990 Chelsea exhibiting debut came at the height of the garden boom, and her first Channel 4 jobs came as the makeover trend peaked. Her TV series have included Wild About the Garden, Plant Odysseys and Great British Gardens. In 2011, a six-part series based on a year in her own garden at Glebe Cottage, Life In a Cottage Garden, was shown by the BBC.
In 2011 Klein closed her nursery business."The mistress of digression" must have been a nightmare for the book's editors. There's a hell of a lot about the early years (interspersed with old plant portrait magazine articles) but I'd have liked to have heard more on her first husband (her brief marriage in London in the late 1960s is covered in a few paragraphs), a suicidal episode after a broken relationship (a sentence), the sex discrimination case, her husband and rock Neil (what did he do for a job, why did they go to Devon?) and the closure of the nursery (a fall out with the landlord over a compost heap that is mentioned in a single par).
Klein was awarded the Victoria Medal of Honour by the RHS in 2018. In May 2024 Klein revealed that she had been diagnosed with breast cancer and had undergone major surgery on 3 April. She recovered to present for the BBC at Chelsea Flower Show in late May, enthusastic as ever, earning widespread public praise, just as this book has.
