For the last 15 years, Nick Hamilton, son of the late Geoff Hamilton, has been busy following in his father’s green-fingered footsteps.

Just wandering around some of the 38 small gardens created for TV at Barnsdale in Leicester, you can feel Geoff Hamilton’s ever-practical presence, as areas are teeming with a huge variety of plants along with practical substitutes for expensive accessories (including a circular finial made from a toilet ballcock – but you’d never know – sitting on top of a pretty, home-made obelisk).

These are all testament to Geoff Hamilton’s money-saving principles, his attitude of having a go himself at making something before shelling out on an expensive equivalent, ever aware of his audience, many of whom would have been cost-conscious.

Nick, who took over the business after his father’s death in 1996, shows me the old copper immersion heater transformed into a rose water feature in the quirky Reclaimed Garden, a typical example of his father’s ideas of economy.

“My father wanted Barnsdale to be representative of what people have at home. Achievability was all-important. He set the springboard from which we’ve dived.”

The TV garden all started in the 1970s, when Geoff moved into a house on the Barnsdale Hall estate and was renting some land at the top of the hill. He was asked to do a guest appearance on Gardeners’ World from what is now known as ‘The Original Barnsdale’.

In 1979, he joined the team permanently, but soon found that there was little room to experiment, and in 1983 he found Barnsdale as it is today, a mile away, a Victorian farmhouse with more than five acres of land.

He created the gardens between 1983 and 1996 but it wasn’t until 1997 that they were opened to the public.

The beautiful Artisan Cottage Garden, Allotment, Woodland Walk and Artificial Rock Garden are just a few of the concepts which have been developed and continue to offer ideas to gardeners today.

Nick acknowledges that times have changed since his father’s TV heyday.

“Everybody’s lives have changed. Retired people are doing more now than they ever did, as are people in work. But it’s making people realise that within their busy lives there’s still time for gardening and vegetable growing.”

He believes that were his father alive today, he would be over the moon at the way Barnsdale has developed. But he doesn’t believe the TV cameras could ever return on a regular basis.

“Our tagline is ‘The People’s Garden’ and that’s what it is. I wouldn’t now want to stop people seeing the garden, even for one day a week.”

* Barnsdale Gardens, The Avenue, Exton, Oakham, Rutland. For more information, visit barnsdalegardens.co.uk or call (01572) 813200.