KEVIN Frediani has been working with plants for 20 years — and it all began with a motorcycle accident.

"I was travelling to work along the Totnes to Dartington road on my motorcycle when I was hit by an articulated lorry," he revealed.

"I spent six weeks in hospital and six months in convalescence with a broken back in three places."

While recovering from his accident Kevin, who had a love of the outdoors, decided to help a mate who had a gardening business.

"It was a world I knew nothing about. It was outdoors," he said.

"I'm familiar with that, but he was telling me there were daisies and dandelions that had Latin names. These Latin names often linked to classical stories of Greek or Roman gods and goddesses.

"I was intrigued and I started reading about the classics. I became quite passionate, not just about the stories behind the plants, but the art and craft of gardening itself.

"It's something which is all-absorbing for me. You can never know all about the subject, but as soon as you start doing something there is a reward.

"If you weed a border you look back and see a clean bed."

Despite discovering this new passion Kevin still planned to join the Royal Marines.

"After three months I re-started the application process for the marines," he said.

"When I left school my father advised me to get a trade. But after studying reprographic techniques at Exeter College of Art and Design I realised I didn't want to work in that industry, so quickly afterwards I looked to pursue what I really wanted to do, which was work outdoors. The marines seemed to fit in well with that."

But fate had other ideas for Kevin.

"Just before my accident I met my wife. During my convalescence she fell pregnant, so there was a different focus to my life," he explained.

Kevin turned his attention to his new-found passion for plants and enrolled on a day release course at Bicton College.

"The teachers were really knowledgeable and inspiring," he said. "It was like a bulb going off. I would come home every day feeling inspired and in awe of what I was being taught. I would be thinking: 'Gosh, this world of plants.'

"Everything about it got me going — from their introduction to this country to their places of origin and the stories around them.

"I loved learning about how plants could be used, how you get plants to grow."

Kevin gained two distinctions at Bicton where he was also the top practical student for showing the most skill in maintaining gardens.

This was an accolade won a couple of years later by BBC Gardeners' World presenter Toby Buckland.

Studying at Bicton introduced Kevin to a world of academia he found he enjoyed.

"It was the first time I'd really been encouraged to study something academically and I realised that although I had to challenge myself it came naturally," he said.

"I didn't have to work hard for it so it was a pleasure."

After a brief stint at Plymouth Polytechnic Kevin achieved the grades he needed to enrol on one of only three horticultural science and applied plant biology courses in the country, at Nottingham University.

After finishing his degree Kevin stayed in Nottingham looking after the landscapes for the city council.

"I looked after a quarter of Nottingham's landscapes, which included graveyards, three golf courses and football pitches as well as ornamental parks and gardens," he said.

"But I realised that although municipal gardens are interesting once I got into the general flow of it there wasn't any scope to experiment with plants, so I moved on."

Kevin's next challenge was a traineeship in the curation of living collections at Cambridge University's botanical gardens.

Kevin said: "The curator of living collections is the person who decides what grows where and why, and how they relate to the visiting public.

"You are the person helping inspire designs and making sure the collections are relevant to the people who visit, or use them scientifically."

Never one to stay put for long, Kevin left Cambridge after three years to take up a teaching post in Scotland.

"I really enjoyed teaching. When I began my studies I had to sell everything to put myself through university," he said.

"By the time I finished my formal education I was really inspired to connect with people and help them learn from the information I had gained.

"During my first week at work I had to teach the Scottish, in the Southern Uplands, how to fell trees. You can imagine how that went down.

"'I don't need an Englishman to teach me how to fell trees' was their response. So I told them 'if you still feel like that in half an hour I'll be gone'.

"Luckily I stayed for three years, so you could say it went quite well."

Kevin's next move was south to Windsor Great Park and Home Park, which is the private gardens of the Queen.

This was a great challenge for Kevin, who had 48 staff and managed 5,500 acres of grounds plus 750 acres of the Queen's private ornamental gardens.

During his time working for Her Majesty Kevin featured on the Royal Gardeners series on the BBC.

"They are some of the oldest gardens in the world. They go back to 1100.

"There are trees there which were around before the castle itself.

"It was an immensely humbling time but also an enriching time in terms of reward for my career. I really felt like I was part of something that went beyond my own time.

"I redeveloped the gardens when I was there. I planted trees which will hopefully be there in hundreds of years' time.

"I put in a lot of naturalistic landscapes. Where areas had been formally mown before I allowed them to flower and let nature take its course a bit more, which was much more in keeping with the castle scale."

When he was first appointed Kevin went to see the Queen in her formal chambers.

"It was really so she would know who I was when she saw me around," he said.

"A lot of my time was spent underneath the windows of her apartment and she needs to know who these people are, especially when she sees you shooing off her corgies!

"Meeting the Queen was interesting because you think everything will be very grand — but it isn't anything like that at all.

"She is a very sweet and understated lady.

"The room was a kind of lounge suite with a coffee table piled high with books, a little TV in the corner of the room and a desk where she does all her paperwork.

"This room is very much a working office cum living room which has two functions. It is where she takes tea and reads and where she does all her formal papers.

"Getting that close to her made me feel quite overwhelmed.

"Consequently I have huge respect for her. Talk about hard working — I may be a workaholic but she can't ever stop."

Kevin made a big impact at Windsor where he put management systems in place. He left when he realised there was potential to see his career out there.

"When they told me I could have ended my career there it was the worst thing they could have said," he said.

"I went home that night, a little bit depressed. Although it was a wonderful place to work, and a real honour if you are creative and turned on by your subject and want to learn more, I switched off when I saw my career mapped out for me.

"Within a month I'd handed in my notice."

Kevin's next position was the first curatorial post in 150 years at London Zoo.

At the time the venue was suffering from low visitor numbers in the wake of being perceived as cruel to animals.

"I turned the position down when I was offered it," said Kevin.

"But I was called by the director who wanted me to take the position because I was someone who would challenge them to take the zoo forward.

"As it turned out the director was a visionary and I joined a hugely dynamic team.

"We did some amazing things. We turned two thirds of the zoo site from tarmac and concrete to green trees and shrubs. And visitor numbers went from 500,000 to 1.2 million."

Kevin and his colleagues took an exhibit to the Chelsea Flower Show, winning a silver gilt medal, something Kevin credits as his greatest achievement to date.

"Professionally, all I've ever set out to do was be a good gardener, but winning the silver gilt medal at Chelsea is pretty hard to top as a horticulturalist.

"The inspiration for the garden we took to Chelsea was a gorilla exhibit we were putting in at London Zoo. I helped design it and brought together the horticultural team that realised it.

"We recreated a Bai landscape — a clearing almost like a fruit bowl for gorillas where the food is always in reach.

"Chelsea allowed us to take a miniature version of the planting and show it to the world a year ahead of the project coming to the zoo."

Soon it was time for Kevin to move on again — this time across the water to the Amsterdam Botanical Gardens.

"If London Zoo was creative and dynamic then Amsterdam was otherworldly," he revealed.

"I arrived in June 2006, and within two weeks there was a six-page spread on me and how I'd come to save their botanical garden in the Dutch equivalent of the Sunday Times supplement."

After two years and more successes it was time for Kevin to realise a 20-year-old promise he'd made to his wife.

Kevin explained: "When I started pulling her away from Devon, I promised that if a position ever came up here — that I felt I could do and would be of value — then I would take it.

"Paignton Zoo was pretty well the only job I would have considered coming back for."

Kevin took up his post at the zoo in June. And already he has begun to develop his vision of realising the potential of plants.

"At a base level this is to improve the site, beautify it and make it of interest to the visitor.

"On the next level I want to educate visitors by taking them a bit deeper and show them a story of interest.

"At the next level it is good to connect to the history, culture and heritage of where the collections comes from.

"It is important to show how plants are interlinked with animals. In the wild these animals can't survive without their habitats and the plants need animals to move them around and propagate.

"And then there is conservation. We are in an age where our human impact on the world is so big we need to make sure some of it is there for future generations."

Kevin has returned to his roots and feels he may have found somewhere to see out his career. But he hasn't lost his passion for his work.

"I think when you start to ask why, what, where and how, you walk through a door, a bit like in Alice in Wonderland, and it is all there to be discovered.

"I haven't reached the last page of the book, I haven't even reached the last page of the first chapter yet."

He added: "I'm not going to change the world like Nelson Mandela, I'm not going to leave a big legacy of money that people can use. But I can lay foundations that will bring value to plants now, and long after people have forgotten who Kevin Frediani ever was.

"That is important to me and is becoming more important as my children get older and I realise how fragile this planet is."

Despite his achievements Kevin is incredibly self critical and always feels he can do better.

"I'll do my best work on the day I retire," he said.