Adam Frost has said he lives with fibromyalgia, describing a life shaped by pain, exhaustion and the habit of turning to plants and music to get through difficult periods. The 56-year-old presenter of Gardeners' World said the long-term condition, which affects around 2.5 million people across the UK, has helped explain both the strain he has been under and the routines that have kept him going.
Frost said he has spent much of his life using gardens and songs as a form of escape. “I worked out that I've used plants and music all my life as a way of escape,” he said, adding that “each part of my garden now is associated with a song” and that some plants connect him to “grandparents, my friends, adventures I've had when I've been abroad.”
His comments, made in the Daily Mail's Weekend magazine, land at a moment when he is also back on screen. Frost and Sophie Raworth are due to present a look back at the highlights from this year's Chelsea Flower Show on One on Sunday, May 24, from 6.15pm to 7.15pm. He has co-hosted Gardeners' World alongside Monty Don since 2016, becoming one of the programme's best-known faces while speaking increasingly openly about the personal cost of the years behind him.
That cost has not been limited to fibromyalgia. Frost has previously spoken about a difficult bout of depression that led him to see a psychiatrist, and he said that advice was blunt: he should not retire. “What came out of it was that I shouldn't retire. He told me I'd be dead in 18 months... 'If you're thinking about retiring, go up the high street, there's an undertakers, go in and choose yourself a box,'” Frost said. He added: “And I thought: 'You're supposed to be helping me.' It was brilliant. My old man used to say: 'Busy hand, busy hands', and I'm like that. I'm a grafter, but I have a different mindset now. I get up to have a nice day.”
He has also said retirement simply does not appeal. “Why would I retire? Retire and do what? Garden? At least this way I get paid for it,” he said. The point is plain in the way Frost talks about work: staying busy is not just a career choice but part of how he has kept himself steady through illness, grief and anxiety.
That strain deepened when he said his wife Sulina fell critically ill with sepsis and spent 12 weeks in hospital. He also said his 15 year old daughter started self-harming and later developed an eating disorder. Then came Covid. Frost said he went into a room on his own for 10 days, and the pressure finally broke. “Then I caught Covid. I went into a room on my own for 10 days and my brain, all the adrenaline I'd been living on - everything came crashing down. I was sitting in a corner bawling my eyes out,” he said.
Fibromyalgia is a chronic condition marked by widespread pain, exhaustion and a range of other symptoms, and Frost's account shows how it has sat alongside other crises rather than apart from them. His latest remarks do not point to a neat recovery story. They show a man who has built his life around work, gardening and music, and who says those things have been less a hobby than a way of staying upright when everything else has pulled hard in the other direction.
