Frances Tophill Opens Up About Feeling “Very Torn” and Finally Clears Up Fans’ Confusion

The article shared in this chat has a strong emotional core, but it mixes that core message with a lot of page clutter (ads, unrelated links, repeated blocks). Underneath all of that noise, one clear story stands out: Frances Tophill is not changing homes every few months — she is explaining a life that has long been split across meaningful places, which can look confusing from the outside.

What works best in that source is the personal honesty. The key line, “I’ve always been very torn,” frames her situation as emotional rather than dramatic. The confusion appears to come from how TV edits locations and timelines, not from constant upheaval in her private life.

Frances Tophill has built a career helping other people create calm, beautiful spaces — but when it comes to her own life, the map has never been simple. The Gardeners’ World presenter has now spoken candidly about feeling “very torn,” and it helps explain why fans have been puzzled for years about where she really lives.

Tophill’s roots are in Kent, and that connection has never gone away. Public profiles tied to her television and festival work consistently place her beginnings in Deal, while also highlighting the training that took her north to study horticulture in Edinburgh. She later became part of the Gardeners’ World presenting team in 2016, building a national profile around practical, environmentally minded gardening.

That career trajectory — Kent to Scotland to the South West — created the backdrop for the confusion now being discussed by fans. In the source article shared here, Tophill explains that viewers sometimes misread her appearances in different regions as evidence of constant relocation. Her point is more nuanced: life has been spread across multiple places that each still feel like home.

There is also a very practical reason this confusion intensified. In a 2023/2024 window, Tophill openly discussed taking on a new garden of her own, and that milestone was filmed and documented, which likely made her location seem newly settled to viewers even though her broader connection to Devon was not brand new. A Gardeners’ World Magazine interview notes she moved into her first owned garden in early 2023, while the BBC Gardeners’ World Magazine podcast episode about “discovering my new garden” reinforced that narrative publicly.

So did she “move again”? Based on publicly available reporting and official profile material, there is no clear evidence of another dramatic house move after that period. Instead, the pattern looks like a long-standing push and pull between identity, work, and belonging: Kent roots, years connected to Devon, formative time in Scotland, and a career that naturally keeps her visible in more than one place. Her current professional base continues to be tied to Devon, where she has been listed as Head Gardener and Grower at the Sharpham Trust.

What makes this update resonate is that it is less a property story and more a personal one. Tophill’s “very torn” comment reflects something many people understand: home is not always one postcode. It can be family in one county, friendships in another, and purpose in a third.

As of 2026, the most credible public picture is this: Frances Tophill remains strongly linked to Devon in her day-to-day professional life, while still openly claiming emotional ties to Kent and Scotland. She is also publicly attached to major forward-looking work, including a planned 2026 RHS Chelsea Flower Show garden, signaling continuity rather than another abrupt reset.

In short, the “confusion” appears to come from overlapping chapters, not contradiction — and her latest comments finally make that make sense.