An audience with gardening queen Maggie Barry

By MICHELE HEWITSON


We'll meet you at the floral clock. It seemed an irresistible thing to say to Our Lady of the Flowers, Maggie Barry.

So I did and that was fine. Except, she said, sounding faintly horrified, we didn't want to take her picture by such a thing, did we?

Not that Barry is a garden snob, you understand. Once she actually saw the floral clock at Albert Park, she rather admired it. We did agree that, really, the begonias beloved of the park's gardeners should be banned. She was, though, at pains to point out, as she clambered into the canna lily bed to be photographed looking like a garden imp, that she was taking good care not to trample those begonias.

She's a good sport, is Maggie (she's become so familiar as the gardener over the back fence that she scarcely needs a second name). She posed poised on tree limbs - not many people could do this with any degree of grace, but she managed. She got right in that garden bed. She drew the line at digging me up a couple of the gloriously red canna while she was there.

But I could help myself to the garden trowel in the back of her car if I was really intent on digging one up.

No doubt someone will feel the need to inform her that she should never have posed with the cannas. They're red, you see, and red-headed people should stay well away from red. This is the sort of thing people feel they can tell Barry.

If being on screen for more than a decade has changed how people respond to her, Barry says it has not changed her, although "I'm probably more guarded than I would have been. I maybe wonder where they're coming from if they start asking personal questions".

When she was pregnant with her son Joey, now 5, she had a couple of people approach her with the aim of laying their hands on her stomach. "Which I felt was really taking it a step too far."

I don't know how they dared. She has always struck me as being brisk and sensible and friendly, but slightly aloof.

She does not, she says, talking about her Outward Bound experience last year, "do the touchy-feely stuff. I must say I don't do empathy". Goodness. What she means is that she refused to put on a "blindfold and dance with people".

But she's not called the Queen of Green for nothing.

She does possess a rather stately manner. In large part this is because she is beautifully spoken in a time when being able to use the English language is not a prerequisite for presenting things on the telly.

Despite this, people think they know Barry simply because she has been in their living rooms for so long. And "what you see is mostly what you get".

There is, too, an assumption that people who do gardening are nice. "Because they are." All of them? "No, of course not." She is looking forward to witnessing some of the rumoured bitchiness of the Chelsea Flower Show when she goes there to film later in the year.

You can imagine she might enjoy that: there has always been, lurking not very far beneath the surface, an engaging acerbity.

She is "an argumentative individual. There's too much evidence out there for me to say otherwise. I think that's the Irish background".

When I ask her whether she can really go back to current affairs and write a "frivolous" column for the Australian Woman's Weekly AND be the nice girl who gardens without there being the danger of some confusion, she says: "That I might go on National Radio one day and start talking about euphorbias?"

"Maggie Barry Returns to National Radio", the press release announced. She would be fronting a show called Outspoken on Tuesday nights. Now that must have had a few people down at Nat Rad trembling in their studios. She says they can all relax. She's not after Sean Plunket's job. Or Geoff Robinson's. "You'll be fine," she says. "I'm not after anyone's job. I don't want a fulltime gig."

There will be no Maggie's Garden Show on the TV this year, for the first time in 12 years. But she has been in Auckland this week filming a documentary for TVNZ about a garden which goes to Chelsea.

She has another couple of garden-oriented doco ideas in the planning.

There will be a gardening show on television but she doesn't know too much about it (she's keeping her nose out) and she certainly doesn't know who will be the new Maggie. She hasn't asked.

She could have pitched a re-formatted show. Could have "stood around while ordinary backyards are transformed. That wasn't really where I wanted to be".

Not many people could say about a new garden show, "If it's moving into attainable, achievable, every person's backyard-type person, then anybody could present it," without sounding sniffy. She's simply being truthful: she knows about plants (she has the horticultural degree). That's the difference.

The decision was amicable. She is not "personally in favour of hissy fits and tantrums".

No. And there is the relationship with the broadcaster to maintain. And of course when Barry went, so did the jobs of the rest of the Garden Show crew. It was "a wrench", she says. And she didn't tell her team that she wasn't going to do the new show. "I wonder if I could have looked after them a bit better. I guess I felt responsible because my name had been on the marquee for a long time."

If the opposite of a high-end gardening show with a marquee is a low-end garden show with a shed, we can safely assume that there will be garden make-overs. There were, in the end, make-overs on Maggie's - despite the show's host making it quite plain what she thought of such things. Or "garden solutions, as I stubbornly called them right to the end. I hated the M-word".

Honestly, everyone knows people want those instant backyards, and that using big words in this country is just showing off. And she doesn't even like begonias. No wonder they gave her the chop. "Yeah, I know. I had it coming, didn't I?"

Probably she did have it coming: 12 years is a lifetime in telly terms. Even when you have had a vegetable effigy made in your likeness. "I knew I'd really made it then."

When Barry was on Morning Report, in the mid-80s, she was going through her "Gina Hard-faced Bitch" phase. Listeners would write in to say: "You're a nice girl. You do gardening."

She is, she thinks, still a nice girl who does gardening. "You can take the show away from the girl but you don't ever take the gardening away."

She is also a company, called Maggie Inc. after one of her son's favourite films, Monsters Inc. "So maybe there are parallels." Surely not.

Although, there she will be one day on National Radio giving some politician a hard time and people will write in to say: "You used to be that nice girl who did gardening."

"Oh, probably," she says, looking quite delighted at the prospect.