It has been interesting to look back over the best part of ten years of writing for theObserver and see my gardening time mapped in words. In that decade my evolution as a gardener has been transformed by a move from London, where for fifteen years I had a long, fenced-in garden in Peckham, to Hillside, an eight-hectare smallholding in Somerset. In London I created a world which provided me with a haven in the hubbub. Here at Hillside my boundaries are distant and the eye can travel. The move was perhaps the greatest change of my life, in gardening terms, but one that was necessary and inevitable. I needed to feel smaller and less in control of my environment and to develop a new way of gardening that allowed me to be closer to the land and its rhythms. The move – the need for which was best explained by a friend who equated my London life to being pot-bound – was also part of a process that every gardener embarks upon when they make the commitment to garden. You cannot help but evolve, for a garden is never static and inspires you to keep pace and develop.
Writing has helped to pull my gardening journey into focus. While the articles in this collection have been selected from a decade of observations and a variety of locations, they have been chosen to cover the twelve months of the year, so that the shifts in the seasons – and in place – are mapped in thoughts and activities. One of the great joys of the gardening year is the fact that the garden forces you to pay attention to the here and now. Every week is different from the next, but there is also reassurance in the repetition; the inevitability of spring blossom, and the flare of the berries at the other end of the growing season. A single year’s experience is like the growth that accompanies it. It builds and layers and enriches.
My own path as a gardener was set at about five years old when my father and I made a pond in the orchard. It was a rectangle of just a couple of metres, but in planting it and watching its evolution through a watery lens, I discovered the alchemy of tending living things and the reward that comes from that process of nurturing. Some describe this as having ‘green fingers’, but to me gardening is a unified combination of skills that is actually not remotely mysterious. It is an ability to observe and to notice the needs of a plant (or combination of plants) and then to respond to those needs. As time goes on and the process continues, we become wiser as gardeners and more confident. We learn that it is possible to break the rules and, indeed, to make up our own. We evolve, we get wilder or neater or more accepting about the nature of weeds.
I feel I had a head start in learning to garden so young, and I was luckier than most because I grew up amongst people who were fascinated by gardens and had an enthusiasm for growing things. My mother, who was brought up in vicarages and whose father had grown produce to eat during the war, tended our kitchen garden. My father grew the flowers and, although I wouldn’t describe Dad as an instinctive gardener, he had a great eye. He also had a way with colour; he was never afraid of it, and we used to spend hours comparing notes while working on a pair of borders on either side of a path, one of which was mine, the other his. It was safer that way, for even then I had an insatiable appetite for plants and was hungry for more ground, and would have happily taken his border too.
Our neighbour Geraldine was also a great influence. A natural
