I’ve never watched Gardeners’ World and never been to the NEC, although I did once watch Monty Don walking round Japan on a travel show. Until recently the only connection I had with gardening was once reseeding a lawn. A neighbour saw me lifelessly lying on the ground, inspecting the emerging blades of grass, assumed I’d had a heart attack and called an ambulance.

What sparked my spontaneous curiosity about BBCGWL was seeing my seaside neighbour, Rhoda Parry of @coastalgardenclub, who has been helping me with my garden, posting a photo of her show border, a 3m x 3m plot, being built there. Rhoda and I live on the edge of the Rye Harbour Nature Reserve on what is an extension of Romney Marsh and the second-largest shingle bank in the world after Cape Canaveral. We are both former magazine editors: she edited Country Homes and Interiors, I started Loaded and edited GQ. She told me about how she once came through an early Loaded open-plan office to deliver some copy to Me and My Baby, and I was in there riding my bike around and smoking a spliff. Award-winning editing in action.

If our magazine careers were very different, our gardens are similar. Both are part of the fields of flint pebbles that exist between Winchelsea beach and Rye Harbour, an area so large and recognisable you can spot it from holiday jets overhead. The landscape’s most famous garden is, of course, the film-maker and author Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage at Dungeness but there are lots of other interesting gardens across the area, such as Marta Nowicka’s brilliant Coastguard Cottage at Jury’s Gap, with its structures of reclaimed and repurposed wood.

I first came to the area in 1987, when my girlfriend of the time and I were driving across the Dungeness estate and I noticed there were raised words mounted on the side of a black wooden fisherman’s hut and went over to investigate. The owner was sitting at an unlit front room window writing. Prospect Cottage was largely unknown then.

In those days most of the houses down there were lean-to shacks but others had what could have passed for garden installations too — that is, bits of old trawlers scattered about. It was Jarman who defined the shingle garden as art installation.

Since then I’ve spent a lot of time in Rye Bay. As well as the landscape, I like the real and fictional history of smugglers like the Hawkhurst Gang and Russell Thorndyke’s Dr Syn. I like that the beaches had been locations for Carry On Follow That Camel and David Bowie’s Ashes to Ashes video. I love that people I’d grown up on, like Paul McCartney, Tom Baker of Doctor Who and Spike Milligan, have lived nearby.

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Eighteen years ago I bought a small white bungalow, Pebbles, at Winchelsea beach to write in, and now people stay there too, but I never really attempted to do anything with the garden myself. An array of kind locals have previously looked after it but last year I realised I had the time and opportunity to get a bit more involved. The Damascene realisation that a garden could be more than just space around the house came more than 6,000 miles away during a two-hour train stop in the Japanese city of Okayama when my girlfriend, Em, and I jumped on a bus and went to the Korakuen Garden.

The beautiful manicured park was the calmest, most cared-for environment I’d experienced. It’s relaxing just remembering it. Broad fields of waterlilies, tiny dams directing streams around well-worn stepping stones and watering flowers and plants — it stopped you in your tracks. There was a small hill that didn’t look real and pretty much everything was green, which I find to be a very relaxing colour.

The most obvious greens in my shingle garden at Pebbles are the cow parsley and various other wild plants, such as sea kale, that occur naturally around here. At one point I had a full border of nettles that were camped like an imposing army between me and my neighbours. Occasional poppies and hollyhocks appear, there’s a massive plant by the front deck that attracts white butterflies and some tubs of lavender and mint, but when I saw on Instagram what Rhoda had done with her garden as part of her training with the Working for Gardeners Association I asked if she fancied another project.

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The association is an organisation that allows people to learn while getting their hands dirty under the tutelage of experienced gardeners with their own amazing places. I’m thinking of doing it myself now.

For Pebbles, Rhoda drew up a plan of what she thought the garden should look like, presented decks with various plants that work in the conditions down here and, working with the local builder Don Cassidy and the Peasmarsh beekeeper Geordie Paul, we erected hazel hurdles from Woven Wood to give guests more privacy. Don cut up a load of railway sleepers for a new pathway and Simon from the Walthamstow Rock and Roll Book Club delivered a massive second-hand fire pit I bought off his neighbour on eBay.

Rhoda, my eldest son and I set about removing eager grass and weeds from the shingle. The coastal weather is so changeable that you can get hot sun and fierce rain within hours of each other from March to October and things just grow or die in extremely fast cycles. Strangely I found myself enjoying the trip to the garden centre — humping huge sacks of fertiliser into trolleys felt satisfying and vaguely like real work. While you can leave the novelty signs and coloured wellies, a lot of the kit is mesmerising. Years ago I would get like this in record shops. So many secateurs, rakes and hose attachments. So many plants that look healthy and welcoming before I’ve managed to subject them to the sea air and mists. Staring at the colourful photographs on packets of seeds, I remembered being fascinated by them as a kid.

A few weeks ago the mental health writer Sam Delaney popped over and said, “Do you have someone who does your garden? It sort of looks chaotic but you can tell there’s something going on here.” Which sounded quite like me, really. I was chuffed because I had just spent three hours weeding the shingle with my Japanese garden tool.

Something that isn’t chaotic, however, is the BBCGWL at NEC: a long slow drift of trudging older folk in non-branded clothing, white cardigans, floral dresses and soft footwear moving into a huge area of stalls and gardens. The numbers and pace are like Glastonbury and the clientele remind me of boarding the Queen Mary 2 in Southampton. Such a big crowd is at odds with the tranquillity and solitude I enjoy in the Pebbles garden. I’m not sure these are my people — I’d still be more comfortable talking about New Order or the Droyds.

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Someone thrusts a pamphlet from the Gardeners Journal into my hands and tells me it includes “Nick Bailey’s plant list”. I keep it because his show garden looks like it was made for Prince, so many shades of purple and mauve. The list reads like John Peel’s Festive Fifty in Sounds 40 years ago, exotic names and wonderful creations.

Looking like a lost member of Led Zeppelin, Monty Don drifts by, followed by cameras, a Hollywood bodyguard and a peloton of fascinated fans.

I find Rhoda. Her beach garden-themed Border of Superblooms has won a gold merit rating. Talking me through the familiar looking bed of sand, shingle, broken sea washed groynes and rusted iron features she takes a tiny flower that looks like a violent orange and yellow felt tip scribble and says, “This is a Gomphrena pulchella from South America. It gives me more satisfaction looking at it, I’m more excited by it than anything I’ve ever seen.” And it’s increasingly easy to see why.