Perhaps this is why Michael McCoy lives in Victoria, but we’ll forgive him this oversight.

McCoy’s benign influence as a gardener is felt nationally, but to refer to him as such is to diminish the range of his activities and the extent of his passion.

Plantsman, horticulturalist, garden designer, author, botanist, teacher, occasional tour leader, TV presenter, romantic, philosopher, columnist, ecological evangelist … he’ll answer to any (or all!) of these appellations, although an innate modesty might prevent him from doing so.

Of course he has not only dug and mulched, planted and pruned, grafted and propagated and he still does all of the hands-on stuff that any practical green-thumber does, but it’s as a thinker and writer about gardens, a gentle guide to and promoter of the eternal appeal of plants, that he is best known.

We meet in North Sydney, in the glorious garden created by fellow designer Michael Bates, one of the subjects of the second series of Dream Gardens, due to pop up on our TV screen any moment now, before proceeding to lunch.

I first met him when he and a fellow gardener called Cathy were digging in the garden of the Mount Macedon mansion belong to transport tycoon Lindsay Fox and his wife Paula. His ideas were original, his plant knowledge impressive.

I asked if the Foxes made much use of the garden. Apparently not. “Mrs Fox drove up once with some girlfriends. They’d played tennis, had lunch, looked at the garden and then headed back to Melbourne.”

Was he disheartened by what seemed a lack of client involvement? Not a bit of it. He saw his time there as essential to the formation of his approach to garden design, his personal aesthetic and was grateful for the opportunity to do so.

But his serious horticultural blooding took place offshore. In the summer of 1991 he had what he describes as the ‘undeserved privilege’ of working for one whole summer in the garden at Great Dixter in East Sussex, one of the most admired gardens in garden-mad Britain and the home of the sainted Christopher Lloyd.

Most ardent gardeners genuflect at the mention of Lloyd’s name. As gardener, columnist for the weekly magazine Country Life, and, most importantly, author of several indispensable books on plants, Lloyd was the grand panjandrum of gardening throughout the Anglophone world. For all his aristocratic hauteur and heritage, he was something of a radical.

On a lecture tour of Australia some years ago, he shocked his Sydney audience, comprising mostly polite North Shore and eastern suburbs ladies, by showing slides of a rose garden he’d ripped out, and replaced with a collection of cannas, bananas and Ricinus communis atropurpurea, better known as the red castor oil plant.

Of his stint with Lloyd, McCoy says, “I can make myself sick with longing, just thinking about that incredibly rich and formative time.”

It’s been interesting to observe from afar McCoy’s ascent to the upper levels of the Australian gardening pantheon. Slowly, inexorably his reputation has risen, mostly in the eastern states where, as he presciently observes, “97 per cent of the most serious garden design is happening in Melbourne and Sydney.”

McCoy and his producers have studiously avoided the formulaic. The show he hosts is, if you’ll pardon the pun, not your commonor garden TV program with female presenters in shady hand-chewed hats or blokes with enough facial hair to stuff a double bed mattress.

At times such shows can resemble promotions for the nursery industry. McCoy operates on a loftier, more intellectual plane. Dream Gardens is for triple-A-level horticultural enthusiasts. Surprisingly it’s rating strongly.

“Amazing. Incredible. Some weeks we were the second-highest rating program after the news.”

McCoy landed the gig almost by accident when Aunty put out a call to identify gardens that would look their best in June. Taking a deep breath, McCoy called the producers to tell them they were crazy. “No garden in Australia looks good in June. It’s the worst moment for any garden.”

And while he was in frank mode and displaying uncharacteristic chutzpah, he took a deep breath and proposed himself as presenter of the show. “If you’re looking for a host, I’d make a good one.”

They told him he was ‘on the list’, did some screen tests and he was chosen.

Most people in the gardening world see it as an inspired choice.

How did he fall into becoming a gardener. ‘’When I turned 17,” he confesses, “I had absolutely no interest at all in gardening.”

Around the time of this birthday, his father fell ill. He moved in with his mother to look after her and take her to and from the hospital. He began fiddling with plants, mostly propagating them.

McCoy Snr had been a profound influence on the McCoy family. “He had worked in a bank but by the time I knew him he was selling insurance.”

Despite an Irish-sounding surname the McCoys were not Catholic but devout members of the Salvation Army,

“Like a good Salvo,” recalls his son, “Dad earned just enough not to trouble his conscience, just enough to keep us kids in clothing, just enough to keep food on the table. “

The paternal passion was far from gardening. It was music. “My father was for 26 years conductor of the Salvation Army band and musical director of all things Salvation in other states. He had perfect pitch, now known as ‘pitch memory’. Sometimes he’d make me go into the next room and bang my fingers on the keyboard so he could tell me which note I’d played.

“We were six children, three of each. Growing up, we all sang and all played an instrument. The girls learned to play the timbrels and the boys brass instruments. I played the tenor horn, a smaller version of the euphonium.”

But a musical career was out of the question for McCoy. We were taught that “you didn’t use your music for anything other than to glorify God.”

Instead he married, had children and focused on making a career and reputation in gardening.

McCoy met his wife Karen, now principal of a public school in Sunbury, at a church gathering. They have three children, Evangeline, 24, Esther, 21, and Theo, 19. The latter, something of a teen pin-up with thousands of young girls following his wacky blog Hey Theo, comprising off-the-wall skits and sketches. As well as filming and performing in his sketches, Theo writes all his own material. As does his father.

McCoy began writing a newspaper column in 1990 when he was 26 and has developed a wonderful way with words, especially when waxing hyper lyrical over gardens and plants.

Describing a visit to the garden at The Priory in Orsan in central France: “I was in a drunken stupor of joy in that garden.”

He talks about ‘exquisite moments’ in gardens, the daily visits to a pink and white species tulip in his own garden: “It makes m heart ache to look at it.

He hymns the praises of the “outrageous meadow planting, planting such as I have never seen” in the Queen Elizabeth Park on thesite of London Olympics.

On the magnificent garden at the Villa Lante in Bagnaia in Italy: “ How is it that a garden with no flowers can have such a sense of moment? And the answer is water. Fountains throw water into the air and no two moments are the same.”

We are lunching at AQUA, overlooking the Art Deco North Sydney Olympic Pool, under the shadow of the Bridge with a distant view of the Opera House. To one’s right, is our beloved Luna Park. Oh, and it was a perfect sunny day. It was not my intention to rub the nose of this visitor in these incomparable Sydney sights. A comparison is inevitable.

McCoy, with a faint hint of triumphalism in his voice, announces that two of the international gardeners at the forefront of new thinking about plants have just been engaged for a major civic project in Melbourne. British academics, James Hitchmough and Nigel Dunnett, professors both and both working out of Sheffield University, have been chosen to plan and plant a four acre meadow around the St. Kilda Road art precinct in Melbourne, thus strengthening Victoria’s claim to be The Garden State.

Series two of Dream Gardens with Michael McCoy airs on ABC TV, Tuesday October 29 at 8pm.