The eccentric gardener: Our new columnist, Emma Townshend, has radical, unusual plans for your outside space. But then, what would you expect from a daughter of rock royalty who looks to Darwin and Buddhism for her inspiration?

Emma Townshend's front garden is something of a talking point among her neighbours. There are the two student medics who suspect her wisteria, which has smothered the front of her house and is now crawling along the phone lines, is responsible for crashing their broadband connection. Then there's the local man who drops by and offers to cut back the bush that is threatening to cover the pavement, and an alternative therapist next door who has grown to rely on her rosemary plant for his aromatherapy concoctions.

'The reason I know anyone at all in my road is from working outside,' she says. 'You meet more locals in a morning in the front garden that you do in a year of getting in and out of your car.'

From next week, Emma starts as our new gardening columnist, a fact which - she will not mind us saying - is not something you would immediately guess from the exterior of the modest Victorian property on a residential street in south Ealing, west London. For one thing, there are obvious restrictions of space, although the limitations of her little plot of land are certain to be familiar to anyone who has gone, spade in hand, into their own back yard and wondered what's a weed and what's not. 'I think that I'm much more like a typical gardener than most people who write a gardening column,' she says. 'I bet I kill a lot more stuff than Dan Pearson does. Also, if I go to the garden centre, I never bring home the prize specimens; it's always the saddest-looking, half-dead ones because I want to try and save them.'

Emma's interest in gardens started aged five when she developed an obsession with her granddad's greenhouse. 'I used to go through the seed draw and pour over all the seed catalogues,' she says. 'He let me order a packet of mixed exotic gourds which we managed to grow. I thought they were so cool. We dried them and I lined them up in my bedroom. I think that was where my fascination started.'

A precocious interest in the flowers produced by the local Women's Institute soon followed and Emma could often be found busily calculating which fuchsia, dahlia or geranium her pocket money could stretch to. 'I used to think that these women, who could grow so many plants that they could actually sell them, must be geniuses. Actual geniuses! It's left me with a lasting devotion to tender 'old lady' plants.'

Her family holidays were spent in Cornwall, which has left her with a love of hard-to-grow, subtropical plants such as agaves, puyas and echiums. Her garden is full of them. 'A lot of Cornish plants are about shelter,' she says. 'Although it's not freezing, you do get very biting winds. I really love the spiky shapes. They don't reward you very much: they're always poking you and giving you rashes but I just find them really appealing. They remind me of holidays spent outdoors. If I wanted an enclosed feeling I'd go and get a posh, dark yew hedge.'

Sub-tropical plants will drop dead at the slightest hint of frost and nurturing them through our deepest winters is something Emma seems to have a gift for. There's an enormous Melianthus major growing in her front garden. Normally these are lifted for winter but even in mid-November hers is so big even the postman has offered to tie it back. There's a huge Canna lily, a big spiky plant normally grown in the tropics, also flourishing out the front alongside an Echium pininana, a native of the Canary Islands which has dramatic blue spiky flowers and grows to 15ft. As winter sets in there's always a frantic scrabble to beat the elements by wrapping, yes wrapping, her precious plants to protect them. 'My uncle grows similar plants to me but he goes out with a huge roll of bubble wrap and very carefully wraps it all in September. I usually forget and only realise when I glance out of a window at a party much later in the year and realise that it has started to snow. I'll rush home, wearing my party outfit and ruining my shoes, and wrap the garden with bin bags, newspapers and whatever else I can find. But my way seems to work too.'

There is a method to her eccentricity, however, and it's based not just in her childhood influences but an extensive knowledge of garden history. After doing a history degree at Cambridge, Emma did an MSc in the history of science and became fascinated by how gardeners adopted the latest scientific ideas, from Gregor Mendel's work on genetics to Charles Darwin's Theory of Evolution. From there she ended up studying the place that gardens occupy in the imagination of the English people, examining the way in which gardens came to be a metaphor for our national being. It's a subject she plans to write a book about.

It was around this time that she became obsessed with reading Victorian gardening magazines. 'They've got really funny adverts in them,' she says. 'Really amazing pictures of incredibly elaborate rock-work waterfalls that you could order for your garden in Peckham or wherever else you'd just moved to. You suddenly get this vision of the newly moneyed middle-class who want to have the latest fashions but are just buying into all the shiny, new manufactured goods that were pouring into gardens as well as everywhere else.'

Her studies were interrupted for a while - and this is not something that many gardening writers can claim - when she got signed to the East West record label. 'Since I was about 14 I'd always wanted to be in a band,' she says. 'But I came to the conclusion that I really hate being on stage. I had a seminal moment when I went to Texas to watch my dad [The Who's Pete Townshend] play when he was last on tour and I thought, 'Oh my God you're so good at this, and you really love it, you are the right person to be doing that job.'' She released one album, Winterland, which sold around 10,000 copies. 'My recording career was summed up by the time when I went to LA to meet my record company. I spent rather too much time taking photos of the Getty Centre cactus garden instead. I'd never seen anything like it. It's cactuses are used as patterning on a really vast scale alongside the most beautiful tiny tubs, all done to perfection.'

Emma is currently training to be a guide at Kew Gardens and has since gone back to teaching. Titles of courses she's taken include 'Victorian Scientific Travellers' and 'The Lunar Men and Beyond'. Her interest in the garden is also intricately tied up with Buddhism. 'I was brought up following the Indian spiritual teacher Meher Baba, who inspired my dad a lot,' she says. 'We spent a lot of time travelling to California, going on retreats in little cabins, doing outdoor yoga classes surrounded by wilderness and snakes. To me, gardens link to that.'

Not surprisingly then, Emma is very mindful of all the things inhabiting her garden. She used to have a family of foxes; while some people would have seem them as pests, she embraced them. 'Their favourite place to sit was in the flowerpots. They would get settled then one would think the other's pot looked better and try and edge him out of it.

'If you just have a close-clipped lawn with flowers round it I think you are kind of robbing your local environment of food and shelter. It's really nice if everywhere you look you see something alive.'

So don't expect run-of-the mill articles with strict instructions on what to plant when, and how to correctly deadhead your roses. Next week she kicks off with a column about a book called The Anxious Gardener written by a psychotherapist. The piece is inspired by all the frantic last-minute work she had to do to get her garden ready for these pictures.

'I think gardens are for sitting and thinking in,' she concludes, 'for reading in, having parties in, sunbathing naked in, watching bees in, looking at the stars in, eavesdropping other people's conversations in. I am really interested in the social side of having a garden but I also think the spiritual function of a garden is high up on my list.'