John Cushnie: JOHN CUSHNIE, who died of a heart attack on New Year's Eve, was the popular gardening expert from Northern Ireland. He was a panellist on the BBC's Gardeners Question Timeand also appeared on the RTÉ programme Greenfingers.
His distinctive rich, gruff voice endeared him to listeners as did his consummate abilities as a performance. He was able to communicate his enthusiasm for gardening to his audience and was never at a loss for a droll comment that would brighten any programme, though never maliciously, except against plants.
He disliked vegetables, and did not have a lot of time for lawns ". . . if those same grasses grew anywhere else, one would call them weeds. It is hard to get excited about what is a massive area of weeds".
In his last Gardener's Question Timeprogramme, which came out immediately after Christmas, he told the audience that "roses were a summer favourite, but who could love a rose in winter when it is just a bare, dead stick"?
He was born in Lurgan, Co Armagh, where his father was a supervisor in a spectacle factory. When he was around 14, he took over the garden of their terraced house where he grew flowers such as asters, gladioli and ordinary annuals that he sold in the town and with the proceeds was able to buy a tiny green house for £23.
When he left his school, Lurgan College, he went to Greenmount Agricultural and Horticultural College. From there he went to the Glasshouse Crops Research Station in Sussex and worked on the breeding of tomatoes and lettuce.
After three years he went to Framptons outside Chichester and was employed in their orchards, mainly on Cox's Orange Pippin and then came back to the Northern Ireland Department of Agriculture and Horticulture to do advisory work.
In 1968, he was alone in the office when a producer from Radio Ulster "came looking for someone to do a piece on Gardeners' Cornerand as there was no one else, he asked me to do the piece". He became a regular on gardening programmes and also contributed to various horticultural magazines and the Daily Telegraphweekly gardening supplement.
When asked by Chris Evans on BBC Radio 2, what he would plant for a hedge, he answered "I love yew" - after the studio had recovered its equilibrium, he was given a slot on the programme as "The Hedge Man". In 1978 he started his own successful business in Co Down, Cushnie Landscapes, which took on contracts throughout the UK for local authorities and private gardens.
As a gardener, he favoured the traditional. He was not an organic horticulturist, for though he had nothing against it, he thought that it would be hard to feed the world organically. He did not use pesticides or many fungicides but admitted to loving weed killers which "if used properly they are the best way of controlling weeds and by applying artificial fertilizer I get better plants, better growth and it achieves what I want to do".
"Gardening is fun. Gosh I wish everyone was a gardener, everyone would be a lot happier," he proclaimed and said of himself, "I am so lucky. All my life my hobby has been my work."
John Cushnie married Wilma Taylor in 1969. She, their daughter Laura and their two sons, Simon and Richard survive him.
John Alexander Montgomery Cushnie: born May 14th, 1943, died December 31st, 2009