Lindi Bilgorri goes behind the scenes at C4's Real Gardens which is produced in Chalfont St Giles

THE television series Real Gardens (Friday, 8pm, C4) might be filmed all over the country from Scotland down to Cornwall, but the nerve centre of the programme is located in our backyard, in Chalfont St Giles.

The 15-strong production team has taken over offices and the high-tech editing suites at the SSVC Services Broadcasting on Narcott Lane. Here, everything from the initial research of each show to the final edit on the tape is carried out.

Real Gardens is not like any other gardening programme.

John Percival, the producer, explains: "We are not coming in to do an Alan Titchmarsh. You see an awful lot of these fairy godmother shows where she comes along and waves a magic wand and turns a pumpkin into a beautiful fairy coach. But you don't see what happens to the garden when it falls apart . The idea of this programme is that it is a real garden.

"We keep going back to these gardens and see how they progress through the season and how different they look from one time to the next."

The research team looked at 300 gardens over a period of three months before selecting just 12 gardens which were right for the programme.

"We wanted a broad spread of gardens," says John, who has produced Gardener's World. "We have gardens no bigger than an average size room to rolling acres. And people from every imaginable social background and wealth or lack of it. We have people from all walks of life. Geographically we wanted it all over the country and as wide an age spread from early twenties to people in their seventies."

The gardens vary from inner city postage stamp gardens to rural acres of land. And the gardeners are just as diverse as the gardens. There is a couple who grow everything organically on their rented land in Cornwall, a man who loves fuchsias, roses and bedding plants earning him the nickname "the bungalow and bedding man" and an Afro-Caribbean couple in Tottenham who are absolute beginners to the trowel and fork.

So where did the research team find 12 gardens which have that certain quality for a gardening programme?

John explains that tracking down well-kept, beautiful gardens was not difficult.

"There is the National Gardens Scheme which lists garden which are open to the public."

However, it was more of a problem finding a garden that had more weeds than flowers. And earth that looked more like rubble than well-fertilised soil for plants to grow in.

To find these gardens the researchers knocked on doors trying to find the right garden, or they just hung around in garden centres to see who was buying plants, or they approached residents associations and estate agents to see who had just bought a house with a garden in need of a helping hand.

The people who have taken part in the series couldn't just sit back and watch the experts create a beautiful garden. They were made to work digging, weed, sowing and pruning while the cameras were away so that the garden was ready for when the crew came back to film.

Real Gardens has four presenters Monty Don, Lisa Davies, Carol Klein and Fiona Muir, who are all experts in horticulture.

"They can all offer advice," says John.

Many of the gardeners are experts and know what grows in their garden.

"They know what they want. It is an exchange of information,"

The schedule is tight. Each programme is filmed just one week before it goes out on air.

Rain does not stop the cameras from rolling.

"That is tough. If it rains we have to work through it," says John.

"Every time Carol Klein has been to an inner city area in Birmingham it has tipped down with rain. It had just been mud pies and she has had to work through it. They are conditions which you wouldn't normally garden in but you have to work through it."

Rain created total disaster with one episode. On one occasions Carol laid loose stone on a mountain side where certain kinds of plants could flourish.

"But it tipped down with rain from morning to night when they were working there and they were just wading through mud," says John.

Filming nature has meant that the crew can not control what is going to happen. Unlike actors and actresses flowers do not bloom to the command of the director.

"Monty Don planted sweet peas in a garden in Worcestershire but with the bad weather they have hardly grown at all, they are awful stunty little things. We had a programme scheduled to praise the progress of the sweet pea but we can't."

Another programme was set to film Lisa picking strawberries in Scotland but the strawberries had not ripened. Instead of picking strawberries, Lisa had to film a piece about propagating the runners of strawberries.

It isn't surprising that John who has spent his life making documentaries around the world now produces gardening programming. Gardening is his first love.

In the seventies he gave up his well-paid job as a documentary film-maker and took on a small holding in Cornwall just two miles away from the couple who have an organic farm on Real Gardens.

His dream of living an organic life lasted for eight years.

"I loved it but I was very poor. I had a family and my two sons thought I was mad. It was tough to grow organically in those days you could not sell organic produce for love nor money."

He gave up the organic farm and moved to London. But John still owns an allotment where he spends many hours digging the ground and growing his own vegetables.

"I think gardening is enormously important. It is the only art form, and it is an art form, as well as being a productive exercise, as well as getting fresh air and enjoying beauty. It is the only recreation which is open to everybody at every social level and every level of wealth."

Real Gardens: Friday at 8pm on Channel 4

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.