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There are those in the gardening industry who would dearly love to see Don taken down a peg or two, but one assumes there is an element of the green-eyed monster in many of the knocking comments: he is annoyingly attractive, women adore him and he makes gardening sexy. When he was anointed as the face of Gardeners' World — the absolute top banana of garden media jobs — he inherited a mantle worn by a series of highly trained horticulturalists, Percy Thrower, Geoff Hamilton and Alan Titchmarsh among them, who had presented the flagship programme through its 36-year history.

Don was the first amateur to front the show and there were rumblings about his lack of horticultural training which swelled to a chorus of disapproval. "The fellow can't garden," grumbles Peter Seabrook, veteran garden writer and a former Gardeners' World presenter. "He's got no qualifications and he gets up there and tells people how to do things." Older, traditional gardeners and commercial nurserymen hate the fact that under Don's influence, Gardeners' World has gone totally organic, eschewing bedding plants grown in peat, for example, and banning all chemicals. "The majority of people want to use Growmore and slug pellets and they're made to feel like criminals," said one. Garden writer Val Bourne defends Don's stand. "He's absolutely with the Zeitgeist," she says, "a campaigner who champions natural gardening as a sensible way to protect the planet. People are very unfair to him: he has energy and real edge and that's important in a tough medium like television." The Times's Stephen Anderton describes him as having "huge professional flair".

Don says his approach has always been to pass on the experience he has acquired by trial and error. "I have no formal training and no links to the world of commercial horticulture in any guise," he wrote recently, "so there is no point in being anything other than subjective." This is obviously part of Don's appeal: if gardening is the new rock'n'roll for a generation of thirtysomething homeowners with a fashionably green aesthetic, then Don is their man, rather as Jamie Oliver was for neophyte cooks or Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall for urban good-lifers ­ identifiably cool, democratic and almost irresistibly enthusiastic. And like Roy Strong, another brilliant gardener with no formal training, Don has an artistic eye — a quality not shared by some of his more technically correct predecessors with their dreary heathers and luridly déclassé colour schemes.

To add to his portfolio of commitments, Don has just bought a hill farm in the Black Mountains. "It takes a huge amount of my emotional thought. Directing creativity towards another piece of land," he says. Is there perhaps not quite enough going on in his life? He shrugs. "It's the buses again, all coming at once. I've always wanted a farm, couldn't afford it till now, and this one came up." He plans to breed native cattle, plant an orchard and a new garden and will move towards biodynamic cultivation ­ a kind of über-organics involving, among other things, gardening by the lunar cycle.

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"The key is balance," he says. "Nature will always win, so it makes sense to work with her, rather than against her." Fortunately, Don has the luxury of not having to make a living from the farm, unlike his neighbours who are glad of a bag of fertiliser to boost yields. Instead, he will continue to do television ­ "Ideally one project a year, originated by me" — write books and give up his newspaper and magazine columns. He intends to take a sabbatical when his Gardeners' World contract ends in two years. "The idea of a simpler, purer life always trails a complex, busy life," he says. "The price is cumulative and at some point you have to pay back into your personal emotional bank." Meanwhile, Sarah holds the fort at home and oversees the building work on the farm — they plan to keep both on.

"Home is us," says Don. "All this TV malarkey happened late in our lives." His wife encourages him to be less commercially driven, he says. "She is not remotely motivated by fame or fortune." He tells me about a conversation he had the other day with a friend whose marriage had just broken up. "I was slightly in my cups and I insisted that what works is not taking each other for granted. You have to be able to adapt: Sarah's and my relationship is renegotiated every month, every day in small ways." It sounds exhausting — such vigour, such self-belief: "I take nothing for granted," he says. "Nothing."

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