Hardy perennial - Beechgrove Garden's Jim McColl at 80

Jim McColl, who recently celebrated his 80th birthday, has become "the grand-daddy of Scottish horticulture" after presenting the Beechgrove Garden for four decades.

In 1978, when the BBC began digging up a patch of garden at the back of its studios in Aberdeen, nobody could have imagined that the show they were creating would become a hardy perennial and its evergreen presenter would still be handing out common sense advice as he started his ninth decade.

In the 37 years since Jim McColl began to tend the Beechgrove Garden he has found fertile soil in the north east but his roots are further south in Ayrshire.

He tells a BBC Scotland documentary that his father was a gardening supervisor responsible for all the parks in Kilmarnock.

"It was part of the fabric of our lives really," he says.

"You are much influenced by your environment and that was part of mine."

McColl also says he learned about farming from his uncles.

He says: "I started into it early on. Even when I was on the farm when I was a kid. Keeping you out of mischief was simple - 'give the lad a job to do'."

Jim continued to blossom at the West of Scotland College of Agriculture, at Auchincruive near Ayr, where after two years formal training he joined the staff and spent the next three years working in different departments of the college.

He says: "What you were doing was learning the rhythm of the seasons, the priorities of the job, the disciplines of how to get it done. It was a hugely important learning curve."

His move to Aberdeenshire came after spending 14 years south of the border as a gardening advisor in Reading.

According to McColl, his time in England taught him more about how gardens worked but also about different climates, soils and methods of working.

"I came back to Scotland a lot maturer than when I left because I realised it was not quite the same up here," he says.

When Jim brought his young family to Aberdeenshire in the early 70s he embarked on a project so far ahead of its time it was featured on BBC TV programme Tomorrow's World.

During the oil crisis of 1973, with energy costs spiralling, he teamed up with the Glen Garioch distillery in Old Meldrum to use waste energy from cooling the whisky to heat glasshouses full of tomatoes.

At its peak by the end of the 1980s it was delivering 200 tonnes of tomatoes from waste energy.

"It was a project that was 20 years before its time," McColl says.

While working at the North College, he was invited to participate on Radio Scotland's Scottish Garden, a weekly radio programme "about helping people to garden better".

McColl says: "Eventually I ended up chairing that programme and then lo and behold they said 'we are talking about doing a television programme'."

John Macpherson, who was producer of the Beechgrove Garden from 1978 to 1989, said: "The ethos was very much to keep the feet on the ground, to keep contact with real gardeners."

According to McColl there were "no pretensions" when he began to lay out the first tiny plot with co-presenter George Barron.

"It was just a back garden, a front garden, a few tubs and troughs, a few conifers and that kind of stuff," he says.

"Because that's what I knew for a fact that people needed more information on."

McColl says: "People responded because it is not beyond their comprehension. It couldnae be if it is coming from me or my late pal George, who was a countryman and a gardener all his days and just got success by trial and error."

But behind his humility about his gardening knowledge is a vast confidence in the abilities he has built up over the years.

He says: "On day one, when George Barron and I stood in front of a camera for the first time, he brought 50 years experience to that spot and I brought 25 to 30 years experience.

"Between us, if we couldn't talk for three minutes about how to plant tatties, it's a bad show isn't it?"

Jim McColl's tenure in the Beechgrove Garden has not been without its fallow periods.

In fact, he was unceremoniously removed from the programme in the late 80s, only to reappear four years later.

In recent years, Jim and long-time Beechgrove favourite Carole Baxter have been joined by George Anderson and Chris Beardshaw.

Beardshaw says: "Jim is one of those rare individuals who touches plants, touches the earth, and is never more content than when he has got a trowel or a spade or seeds, or the produce that he has gained from the garden in his hands."

George Anderson says: "Working with Jim has been absolutely magical."

Jim McColl at 80 is on BBC One Scotland on Sunday 27 September at 17:35.

The Beechgrove Garden is on BBC2 on Thursday 1 October at 19:30