'Neath a shady bower, Home Truths reporter, Ian Peacock, has been unearthing the real relationship between gardeners and their clients…

Mart first came into the garden (Maud) after a career as an actor. His clients prefer to see their gardens as kind of two dimensional televisions, "They don’t want to touch it. They see you as their protector from all that wet and dirt and creepy crawlies."

Not content with phobias, clients dabble in denial. To put it another way, they fib. Mart - "What I see from visit to visit tells me what they’ve done. A lot of people just deny it. They say, 'It just died! and I say, 'Did you water it?' 'Of course I watered it!' It's absolutely obvious that they didn’t do anything! And they say, 'No, I watered it, I did!' "

Couples in the garden are trouble… Mart - "Normal scenario would be well this year we’re going to plant asters in that bed. And the other person will be saying no, I think that’s ridiculous, we’re going to plant begonias. And then I would be expected to look up at the sky, look around a little bit, and then say ‘ well I think begonias would be better … in those situations, I’m definitely expected to be the arbiter. It’s easier."

Garden designer Catherine says it's twenty-five per cent gardening and seventy-five per cent psychology, and gardens often resemble their owners, "Probably rounder people tend to like curved gardens and tall thin people like straight gardens… one couldn’t generalise completely. I don’t think you could do an academic thesis on it…"

Then there's the compost fetishist, "There was one client I went to whose pride and joy of the entire garden was the compost heap. He spent hours over it each day just getting it right. It was the quality, the size, the content of the work - it was a work of art. And I just felt like having the entire garden sort of focused on the compost heap in adulation of it."

And Richard, as an ex-banker, knows how important it is to make people at least believe they're getting value for money, "Customers will assess you by the amount of rubbish you generate. In other words, in order to please your customer you have to generate a mountain of rubbish, that impresses them. I’ve also got a very elderly customer who can’t see to well, so to impress her I have to make lots of noise. I’ve got the mowers, strimmers and hedge-cutter going - she knows there’s lots going on."