There is an old story, probably apocryphal but instructive nonetheless, about an American visitor to a stately English home who happens on one of the gardeners while strolling through the grounds and compliments him on the stunning flawlessness of his expansive lawns. How, the American wonders, might he achieve such verdant splendor back home in Ohio?

"Not a great deal to it, sir," says the gardener simply. "Just cut the grass twice a week in season, and give it a light dressing of fertilizer in spring and autumn. Repeat that for four hundred years and eventually you should get a pretty fair lawn."

Venerability counts for a lot, of course, but there are some factors that give the British an edge when it comes to making things grow. For one thing, there is the moderate climate, a result of the caressing wash of the Gulf Stream, which keeps most of the landscape green year-round and allows palm trees to flourish as far north as parts of Scotland. And then, of course, there is the rain, a more or less (but mostly more) constant feature of British life. Contrary to popular belief, Britain does not receive huge volumes of precipitation. In fact, most British rain doesn't even really fall. It just hangs there as a kind of microscopic drizzle-negligible in terms of measurement and irksome to be out in, but perfect for keeping things lush.

But there is one other consideration far more important-far, far more important-than anything nature bestows. It is this: the British take gardening seriously. Boy, do they take it seriously.

It would be putting it mildly to say that gardening is central to British life. It is the nation's most popular leisure-time activity. An Englishman is far more likely to show you around his garden than his house. At least half a dozen gardening shows enjoy prime-time slots on television. An amazing variety of gardening books fills every bookstore. And it is undeniably an enormous business-the fifth biggest in the country by some measurements.

One of the most popular and long-running shows on British radio-and there are still millions of people in Britain, incidentally, who huddle around their radios in a way not witnessed in America since the days of Franklin Roosevelt's fireside chats-is a program called Gardeners' Question Time, in which a panel of gardening exerts responds to questions put to it by members of the public.

Listening to Gardeners' Question Time is like taking a trip to another world-one in which people casually bandy about Latin terms and everyone seems to have an advanced degree in botany. A typical question runs something like this: "I have had chronic and exasperating problems with powdery mildew infestations on my Coreopsis verticillata. I tried cross-propagating with Coreopsis grandiflora, but with no success. Can the panel suggest another approach?"

The panel then discusses the problem sagely for several minutes, offering authoritative stratagems for dealing with powdery mildew, leaf spot, pernicious rust, pear scab, and other alarming-sounding blights, and generally concluding that the questioner has likely made some overhasty assumptions with regard to his pH balance or else neglected to take into account the vagaries of saprophytic leaching.

"It's a common oversight," one of the panel members will generously concede, "but a judicious application of buprimate and triforine should put matters right."

"That's assuming the problem is systemic, of course," another panel member will hastily interject.

"Oh, but of course. If it's not systemic you'll need to apply thiophanate methyl-but that goes without saying."

And on that reassuring note they move on to the next question.

I would have to go back to college to understand one-twentieth of what transpires on Gardeners' Question Time, and yet this is a program listened to devotedly by millions from every walk of life-people like my late father-in-law, for example. As he himself would be the first to admit, my father-in-law was not one of the century's great minds. He was a London bus driver, a more or less exact British equivalent of Ralph Kramden on the old TV series The Honeymooners, but with one central difference. Where Ralph Kramden carried a lunch box and dreamed of improving his bowling score, my father-in-law carried a folded copy of Gardeners' Weekly and dreamed of growing the perfect chrysanthemum.