Life is so blooming wonderful for Len...

Len Keeley is a keen gardener who specialises in dahlias by the dozen, chrysanths by the score - and silver cups and medals by the thousand.

For all the massed arrays of flowers and flawless vegetables at his Thundersley home, the most impressive sight of all is the line-up of glittering prizes that these flowers, with a bit of help from Len, have won.

Len, a sprightly 80, keeps a straight back and a pair of eyes that glint even more brightly than his silver cups. He is living testimony to the power of gardening to keep a man fit and mentally agile.

Or is it the winning that does it? Tough guys as well as gentle souls inhabit the world of flower shows. "I am," Len admits, "a competitive person by nature. When I enter a flower show, I always do so with the hope of winning."

Win is what he has done, consistently and wholesale. Len has carried off more than 1,000 top prizes at flower shows. This season alone he has won 25 top prizes.

There are no official statistics for this sort of thing, but members of his family are confident that his achievement is unparalleled. How many other gardeners can boast a crop that size?

As for Len himself, he displays this year's prizes, stores the old ones, and long ago seems to have given up counting. He has better things to do with his time, like tending the next bunch of winners.

Remarkable enough in itself, the record becomes even more redoubtable when you realise that Len has always worked with a handicap. It is one that would have kept many people locked indoors, watching Gardeners' World on TV perhaps, but never venturing into the real world of the soil.

Len was born with a deformed hand. He himself is dismissive of the impediment. "Because I've always had it, it's never really concerned me," he says. "I don't really even think about it. I just get on with things."

Nevertheless, the handicap looks formidable and, as anybody who has ever tried to use a watering-can one-handed and ended up watering themselves can testify, two hands are normally a fairly vital tool in the garden.

From the day that he discovered competitive showing however, Len was never going to let trivial snags get in his way. As a youngster, he says that he won "my fair share of athletics medals".

Perhaps he was looking around for something else at which he could start winning. At any rate, as a young family man living in Brentwood, he says: "I caught the show bug from a good old mate of mine who was interested in dahlias. So I set out to see if I could do as well as him."

The very first show he entered, in 1956, was the massive and cut-throat Brentwood show. The novice presenter still speaks with pride about his achievements there - "two seconds and a third."

He then embarked on a strategy of near military precision, often displaying his blooms at two shows on the same day, and covering all the shows in a radius of about 30 miles.

Each of the 1,000 glittering gardening prizes speaks for itself, but Len also seems to have relished the competition that was forever breathing down his neck.

He found that you could never rest on your laurels - or dahlias, in his case. "Someone else is always coming up from somewhere and you have a new battle on your hands," he says.

Ask Len about the pleasure he gets from gardening, aside from winning, and he replies, simply: "You do the work, you stand there, and you see the finished results of what you've done." By contrast: "At work, you solve a problem, and then another problem promptly crops up."

In Len's case, the work in question was engineering. Away from his flowers, and his equally painstaking winter hobby of stamp-collecting, his speciality was control valves (governing North Sea oil pipes and the like).

The precision nature of the work and the very word control itself may well reveal a lot about Len's gardening. "Attention to detail is my motto," he declares.

Len now cultivates a long strip of ground that dips to the north from the Thundersley heights.

The house and garden were the property of his second wife, Marjorie (his first wife died in 1978). The couple now garden in partnership. Between them, the pair have created a valiant sight.

The champion chrysanths and dahlias are lined in impeccable rows. Soft fruit is trained on the fencing. There are other flowers, but Len says, "I'd rather grow one or two things really well than lots of things and not be so good at any one of them."

And, of course, it goes without saying that not one of the flowers visible in this whole tract of land is a weed. Here, at home, as well as at the shows, Len Keeley has nature in the palm of his hand.

At the far end of Len's garden is a walnut tree. Len can't, of course, hope to display this at any show. Nevertheless, it is everything that you would expect of a Keeley plant.

The tree is blooming with health, tall, strong and rich with fruit, and it soars above rooftop level. Yet this is a tree that has been brought back from the ranks of the dead.

The 1987 hurricane felled it, along with millions of other trees. The day after the great wind Len examined the poor, uprooted creature, "and," he says, "I decided that it could be saved."

That was it. There was no way the tree was going to be allowed not to live. Len hired a builder's jack and slowly, ratchet by ratchet, started to crank the tree upright.

"It took a fortnight," Len says. "The weight of the tree kept pushing the jack back into the ground." Eventually, Len solved the problem using concrete blocks.

How many men can claim to have propped up a full-grown tree, in more ways than one, single-handedly?

The walnut tree, along with all those cups and medals, stands as the perfect memorial to a man who clearly doesn't know the meaning of the phrase "to be beaten."

Single-handed success - Being born with a deformed hand hasn't stopped dahlia grower Len Keeley produce champion blooms

Picture: ANDY PALMER

Converted for the new archive on 19 November 2001. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.