MY LIFE IN A GARDEN by Carl Gorham: Nature? It will ruin your garden

What could be more relaxing and fulfilling than a spot of gardening?

Fresh air, plants, birdsong, the hum of a lawnmower . . . no wonder barely an episode of Gardeners’ World goes by without Monty Don earnestly assuring us that ‘gardening is good for your mental health’.

Yet the reality is that gardening can also be intensely frustrating and disappointing.

Plants get eaten by slugs, weeds abound, and your carefully nurtured seedlings mysteriously wither and die.

So it’s refreshing to read a memoir which, while centred around the restoration of a garden, is written by someone who just can’t see the point of gardening. ‘You make something beautiful in a garden and nature ruins it,’ Carl Gorham grouses. Far from being a healing interaction with the natural world, he regards working in the garden as ‘a dour, repetitive series of mucky jobs’.

He is so uninterested in gardening that when he lived for several years in a flat in south London which had two burned mattresses in the front garden, it didn’t occur to him to move them.

Yet in 2005 he became the owner of a house in Norfolk which had a three-acre garden with ‘hedges, beds, shrubs, plants, a sunken valley, a beech maze, a firepit and nine lawns’.

He and his wife Vikki had bought the property on impulse, swept away by images of growing their own vegetables, holding parties in the garden, and sleeping under the stars on summer nights.

Owning a place like this was a sign of their confidence in the future: Vikki had endured years of treatment for cancer and was now apparently in remission.

Sadly, she died suddenly, two years after they acquired the house.

From then on, Gorham faced one challenge after another. Not only was he struggling with his grief and raising his young daughter, he also had to cope with the death of his mother, his own battle with cancer and then a nervous breakdown.

Not surprisingly, the garden was neglected and became ‘a creeping, gloomy presence reaching out in all directions like an invading army’.

Eventually he and his new partner, Emma, decided the house was unaffordable and would have to be let. Gorham was put in charge of restoring the garden, and it’s his account of his bungling attempts to knock it into shape that is the heart of this warm, funny and sometimes very moving book.

He mines plenty of wry humour from his struggles with the garden, which he views as ‘a disobedient child I’ve been put in charge of and am having no luck in pacifying’.

But as he toils over the weed-infested paths and the bramble-choked borders, he comes to realise that, despite his lack of knowledge, the garden has sustained him through 15 years of ups and downs.

Gradually, he makes his peace with it. He and the garden are ‘like two old lags who’ve set aside past differences and agreed to work together on a final job’.