Gardeners' World presenter Adam Frost has strongly criticised oversized outdoor chess sets, describing them as a 'complete and utter waste of space' and revealing he once refused to install one for a client. The 56-year-old horticulturalist made the comments while appearing on Channel 4's Sunday Brunch to promote his new podcast collaboration with Caitlin Moran.
Frost's Strong Dislike for Plastic Chess Sets
Co-host Tim Lovejoy brought up Frost's well-known aversion to large outdoor chess sets, prompting the BBC star to elaborate. 'The massive, plastic chess sets. You go to a hotel, or even people put them in their garden!' Frost exclaimed. He criticised the plastic pieces that 'slowly change colour' and noted that children often misuse them. 'Really, kids just use them to attack each other,' he added.
Frost advocated for a more traditional approach to chess in the garden. 'If you want to play chess in your garden, buy a board, a set, take it out into the garden around a table with a nice drink. Civilised. Don't do that plastic, no,' he insisted.
Rejecting the 'Immersive Experience' Argument
When Lovejoy suggested that the giant pieces create an 'immersive experience', Frost quickly dismissed the idea. 'That's not immersive! How is that immersive? No. It's a complete and utter waste of space,' the gardening expert asserted. Swimmer Mark Foster, another guest on the show, proposed that the sets could be viewed as garden art 'installations', but Frost remained unconvinced.
Frost then recalled an early career moment when he 'refused' to create such a feature in a client's garden. 'I can remember, first doing a landscape job very early on when I had a small landscape company and someone wanted me to lay a checkerboard paving pattern in their back garden,' he recounted. 'I refused, very politely. I just couldn't do it. It's just a no.'
Bittersweet Update on Moving Home
Frost's confession comes after he shared a bittersweet update on leaving his old home following a move last year. In October 2025, he traded his Grade II-listed 18th-century farmhouse and its two-and-a-half-acre garden for a different farmhouse, where he lives with his wife Sulina and three of their four children: Abi-Jade, Jacob, Amber-Lily, and Oakley.
Reflecting on the move in a video with Gardeners' World magazine, Frost said, 'If you're leaving your house and you've gotta leave the garden that you've loved for a long period of time... if you're like me, I wouldn't worry about it at all, I've done exactly that. We left in October, what have I taken with me? Probably a few little bits I dug and divided, contained them. And then obviously I took all my pots with me. Outside of that, I haven't bothered.'
He added, 'And you know, the beautiful things is, I went back to see the couple that have bought the garden and I walked around with them and they are absolutely loving it. And I think that's a great thing to hold on to, is the fact that maybe you've just left somebody else a whole load of joy.'
Previous Struggles with Burnout and Depression
Frost, who joined Gardeners' World in 2016, previously revealed that the family had downsized to his former Lincolnshire home—comprising two former estate workers' cottages from the 1840s knocked into one—because he was suffering from 'burnout' and depression. In an interview with The Times last year, he explained, 'We moved to our current home in Stamford, Lincolnshire, in 2022 because I needed to simplify my life. I had been working like a lunatic.'
'When I fell ill with Covid in 2021 and was forced to stop and isolate, everything came crashing in. It was as if somebody had removed my footings. Emotionally, I was gone. Even my passion for gardening disappeared. When I looked out of the window at the vast garden I had created, all I could see were jobs. Ten days later, a psychiatrist diagnosed burnout and depression. Talking and medication helped, but I needed to rethink my life. It became obvious that to get back on track mentally, I needed to downsize to a property with a much smaller garden.'
Frost's current location remains undisclosed.
