Living: A growing passion

Now that we have equipped our kitchens with pasta makers and stripped our Edwardian floorboards bare, where shall we turn to exercise our imagination s and our credit cards? To the garden, of course, where a proliferation of gadgets and implements will tempt us. By Serena Mackesy

While straight pornography always has its place, every generation has had its own special form of erotica, that thing they sit up at night and work themselves into a froth about. The Victorians had table legs and Little Nell. The Romantics got those little shivers from the giant sandalled foot in The Castle of Otranto. The permissive society was heavily turned on by reading beneath the sheets Elizabeth David's thousand ways with garlic. The past 15 years has seen sex injected into the Poggenpohl kitchen, the free-standing bath catalogue and the search for the perfect stripped wood floor.

But tastes pall. What was once the biggest turn-on becomes the routine in the middle of which one or other participant will remember they forgot to put the cat out. The human animal ensured its slide up the evolutionary scale by cultivating a need for variety, and the search for the ultimate stainless steel pedal bin is becoming last year's yawn. Nature, though, abhors a vacuum. What are we going to replace House Beautiful with as we hurtle towards the millennium?

Damian Grounds seems to have the answer. His Chichester-based company, Hortus Ornamenti, produces hand-made, finely balanced and beautiful-to- behold garden tools at prices to match, and it is going great guns. These are the Belgian chocolate of horticulture: a gardener with one of these in their hand will glaze over with lust. Selling mainly through mail order, garden shows (he will be showing at Chelsea at the end of May) and such grand shrines as Clifton Nurseries, the Museum of Garden History and the recently restored Heligan in Cornwall, his forks, trowels and weeders cost between pounds 26.95 and pounds 29.95.

The April issue of Gardens Illustrated carries a special offer on the Hortus Ornamenti "portable potting shed", a hand-made deal box containing weeding fork, round-dished trowel, four-tined fork, extra-tough pruning scissors, copper plant labels for those permanent verdigris border markers, jute twine from India and a Garden Visiting book to write those all-important notes in. All this for pounds 169, which is pounds 36 less than the normal selling price. The last run of this offer resulted in 51 sales.

All this comes as no surprise to Chris Klokkaris, Research Manager at EMAP Apex, where advertising volume across the spectrum of gardening magazines rose by 43 per cent in the last year (it handles the advertising for, among others, Practical Gardening and the Royal Horticultural Society's extremely upmarket The Garden). Anna Pavord, Associate Editor of superior style-sheet Gardens Illustrated, has noticed that advertising volume has "gone through the roof".

The interesting sub-plot, though, is that it is mainly at the upper end of the market that things are really taking off. A scan of the classified ads in the garden glossies reveals firms making a living from providing every sophisticated and costly accoutrement the hortophile could want: Versailles-style plants; terracotta and stone pots and urns, including antiques that can be delivered from Alicante in Spain; balustrading; yellow snowdrops; brass plant labels, life-size animal sculptures in copper chicken wire, topiary sheep and pigs. A company called The Maker of Scarecrows will make a mannekin to your specifications. The number of gardening courses currently available is staggering: Gardens Illustrated carries ads for 13 courses and educational holidays in this month's issue alone.

Daphne Dormer, of the Chelsea Gardener, a nursery based in London and East Anglia, says that the trend upmarket has become very noticeable. "This last month has been a lousy one for all garden centres because of the cold, but since the sun came back things have really started to take off. And what people seem to want is the top of the range on everything." Hottest selling items so far this year are the Sunbeam Spectrum barbecue ("perhaps they're remembering last summer, but everyone's keen on those"), which retails at pounds 625 including several hours' installation by trained staff. Orchids are popular, also, particularly the exotic and sexy phelanopsis. Phelanopsis sell for between pounds 39.95 and pounds 49.95 "but the amazing thing is that people are buying six or seven in one go".

The biggest line is topiary. "They're just walking out at the moment," she says. The Chelsea Gardener's topiaries start at pounds 19.95 for a simple box globe and progress through to huge box obelisks at pounds 275.95. Twirly cones, obelisks and animals in bay cost pounds 140-150. An oleander lollipop, eight feet tall and about to burst into bloom, is pounds 250. A pair of lollipop bays, hanging 9ft up on a spiral stem, are pounds 399. If you think about the fact that such a tree takes 15 years to grow, this doesn't seem such an extravagance. It seems we can't get enough of these exquisite combinations of art and nature.

Damian Grounds, a refugee from the hurly-burly of a London marketing career, started out making wooden and stone obelisks, climber and topiary frames (he trained originally as a sculptor). The company still produces them, to the customer's specifications, at between pounds 195 and pounds 495 a pair. These are works of art in their own right: very Elizabethan, very strokeable.

A while ago, his father inherited a weeding fork with a hardwood handle and two round tines. It had belonged to a man who had worked for Gertrude Jekyll in her garden at Munstead. It was the perfect implement for hauling out those infernal invaders without damaging the aconitums. He asked Damian to make him another. He learned to turn wood and produced a perfect copy. Father placed an order for 10 more for Christmas presents. Two years ago, Damian picked up a last-minute stall at the Country Living magazine fair to test the water. The forks sold so fast he had to race home and work through the night to fill orders. And so the business was born.

Last year, he dispatched 5,772 tools, and interest is still growing. He "almost immediately" found himself in the international market. Like Samantha Fox, he is big in Japan: "It's partly because they're English, and the Japanese are huge on all things English. But they have a great respect for quality as well." Americans over for our garden shows have carried his stuff across the Atlantic, where they have been greeted with wild enthusiasm. He has been commissioned to make three obelisks for Martha Stewart, the East Coast's guru of good taste, whose magazine and television shows are syndicated across the continent and are probably the most influential style advisories in the US at the moment. He is also hoping to strike deals with various wedding list emporia: he reckons that the majority of his British sales are gifts for other people.

Bracing himself for the resultant rush of orders, he is still debating how best to expand the company. "We're going to have to take someone else on," he says. "That's obvious. But at the moment I send a hand-written letter to every tool I send out, and that sort of thing matters in this market. People like touches like that. When we go to fairs, sales almost invariably double when I'm on the stall in person. It's not just the quality of the product, you see. People like to hold the tool in their hand and think 'I met the man who made this'."