At your service: Ralph Hoare, the 104-year-old tweeting garden guru

THIS is Ralph Hoare. He's 104. He has an iPad, a Twitter account and an international gardening career. Oh, and he plays piano like a pro.

Ralph Hoare

RALPH Hoare is sitting in his well-worn armchair, iPad on his lap, scanning through the Twitter page that he uses to share gardening tips with the public

A new question pings through: "Dear Ralph. What’s a good plant for a north-facing garden?"

"Well, that’s an easy one," he says, peering through his spectacles. "The pyracantha, a shrub with red berries and sharp thorns, or even the cotoneaster, from central Asia. Or what’s that other one? It’s name starts with an H . . ."

It’s a rare memory slip but one that can easily be forgiven. For Ralph, - born in July 1908, is 104 years old. Given that he planted his first flower - a Japanese anemone - at the tender age of six, that means he has racked up a formidable 98 years’ horticultural experience.

And gardening, as evidenced by the success of television shows such as Ground Force, continues to be a thriving industry. So much so, in fact, that Ralph is now dispensing his knowledge via the Twitter page set up for him by a home and garden furniture centre.

Since #askralph was launched last week by the local branch of Furniture Village, questions have been flooding in. These range from "what are the easiest veg for young children to grow?" - cress and lettuce, according to Ralph - to "when should you pull up potatoes?". The answer: when flowering is over and the leaves start to go brown.

One Twitter user, Brian Gable, asks: "When should vegetables go in the ground this year, given how cold it is?" In Ralph’s view, late April will be best. Another, Heather Darling, asks why her money plant is wilting (it’s probably due to overwatering).

Others ask which plant Ralph would like to see make a comeback - "Virginia stocks" - and what his favourite climber is: "Clematis, as it’s very versatile and has beautiful flowers".

To all these questions, Ralph, a great-grandfather of six, seems to know the answers - and if he doesn’t, he can soon find them in his well-thumbed "bible", The Small Garden by C.E. Lucas Phillips, his favourite reference book, first published in 1979. But despite his extensive knowledge, he modestly insists that he is no expert, merely a gardening-lover since childhood.

His early years were spent mostly in Plymouth with his parents, Elsie and Charles, and two younger siblings, John and Margaret.

"We had a small east-facing garden. Mother grew roses and Father grew huge marrows," Ralph recalls. "World War I began while we were young and Plymouth saw a lot of action. I used to hide under a table with a cushion over my head when the German Zeppelins were expected. But whatever happened, we always had flowers in the garden."

After leaving school at 17 Ralph became a bank clerk, but when World War II broke out he joined the RAF and moved to Edinburgh, where he worked as an aviation candidate selector, interviewing potential pilots.

In 1940 he married his sweetheart Dorothy, an accomplished piano player, and they started a family - Michael, now 63, and Kate, 57. Despite work, family commitments and a keen interest in sport - he played a round of golf and went canoeing at Slimbridge Wetland Centre in Gloucestershire on his 100th birthday - he always found time in the evenings and at weekends to garden.

It was only in 1957, though, when the family moved to the detached house in Gloucester where he still lives, that he could put down roots, both metaphorically and literally, and create the garden of his dreams.

For decades, with Dorothy weeding by his side until her death in 2007 at the age of 94, he has lovingly tended his 70ft garden. Short of grape vines, which hold no interest for him, there is hardly any common planting he hasn’t tried to grow - and he has views on them all.

Carrots and parsnips are the most difficult vegetables, he says. Parsley is also tricky, as it doesn’t germinate very quickly. But potatoes are easy, as too are onions, so long as the shoots are hidden under compost to hide them from birds.

Tomatoes are best grown in pots but geraniums - or pelargoniums, as Ralph calls them, using the old-fashioned name - grow best in a trough. Petunias need a lot of sunshine and don’t like rain. Sweet peas, on the other hand, needs lots of water.

The techniques and tools (spade, trowel and fork) - that Ralph uses are entirely traditional.

The only big changes in his lifetime have been the introduction of specialist fertilisers and slug pellets - as a child, he used to peel off caterpillars by hand and stamp on any snails he found. He insists that there are no "magic secrets" to gardening and that the most important ingredients are hard work and preparation.

"People must de-stone the soil and sift it until it’s crumbly before they even think about sowing seeds," he says. "They must also weed constantly, especially at the beginning of the planting season."

Ralph follows his own advice. His garden is bursting with daffodils and the flowerbeds are stocked with purple hyacinths, winter jasmine, beautiful climbing plants and a flowering evergreen hedge of Berberis darwinii. A plum tree and two apple trees, all rigorously pruned to provide bumper crops, stand proudly in mid-lawn.

But it is the roses that fill Ralph with most pride. At the rear of his garden are some 200 floribunda and hybrid-tea bushes which in summer will produce flowers of many shades and a glorious scent.

Despite his age and a creaky left knee, Ralph still does most of the work himself. He can still, with difficulty, plant potatoes, although he now uses a tall hoe for weeding and a grabbing tool for picking things up. His great-grandchildren help with dead-heading the roses and weeding, but only under his close supervision.

This year it’s been too cold to get out much. He is waiting until the end of the month to sow his onions and potatoes but doesn’t mind the delay.

"Gardening is all about having something to look forward to," he says. "It gets me through the winter. If I’m ever depressed or lonely, I think to myself 'never mind, the roses will be along soon'". It gives me the willpower to keep going.’

So too, it seems, does spreading the word on Twitter, though he sometimes needs help from family members to type the replies.

"I’m not really into computers," he says. "I only use my iPad for email, Twitter and to place bets on horses. But if giving a bit of advice gets people into gardening, that can only be a good thing. They may all live past 100 then.

As he walks steadily among the roses, leaning on his stick and breathing in the crisp, cold air, he says: "A-ha! I’ve remembered the name of the plant that begins with H and is good for north-facing gardens. It’s hydrangea."

RALPH'S TOP TEN GARDENING TIPS

1. Pour boiling water on parsley seeds once they are in the soil. It helps them to germinate.

2. Planting marigolds with tomatoes will stop the tomatoes getting greenfly.

3. Surround small plants with crushed up seashells or spiky gravel to keep slugs away.

4. If you have an unruly pampas grass, burn it down. The root will remain and regrow.

5. If your plant is an iron-lover, put rusty nails in water for a while, then use this as a fertiliser.

6. Prepare your soil in the moonlight, as this discourages weed growth. Seeds can’t germinate without sunlight.

7. Plants that spread rapidly, such as mint, can be contained by planting them in a long pipe, buried vertically. The roots have to go a long way down to spread.

8. Most plants like warmth, so water them with warm water.

9. To keep cut flowers fresh for longer, put a penny in the vase. The copper helps to kill bacteria.

10. Peeing on your garden can be beneficial. The urea contains nitrogen, which soil bacteria convert to ammonia so it can be taken up by plants. Peeing on tomato plants can apparently double their fruit production.