I thought of her as a flower : the story at the heart of one gardener s life
Marc Hamer s gardening memoir offers an insight into what it is like to tend somebody else’s plot, and how an unusual relationship blossomed
24 January 2021 • 12:00pm
Far from following the mould of D H Lawrence, Marc Hamer’s novel describes a different kind of relationship
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Think about the niche genre of “books about gardeners and their mistresses” and few come to mind. D H Lawrence’s infamously florid Lady Chatterley’s Lover has set the bar when it comes to the outdoor staff-employer relationship, but this winter sees the publication of another, more cerebral take on it – and this time, the story is told from a green-fingered labourer’s perspective.
Marc Hamer
Review by Rosemary Goring For more than 20 years, Marc Hamer has tended a 12-acre Welsh garden that lies behind wrought iron gates, rarely visited or seen. Its owner, “Miss Cashmere”, was once young, with a family and husband, arriving from London only at weekends and holidays. When the nest emptied, the house and grounds became her and her husband’s home until he died and she was left, growing old elegantly, like her elderly green Jag. A man of many previous occupations, from railwayman to graphic designer, Hamer’s previous book is A Life in Nature: or How to Catch a Mole. Although he is not a gardener in the mould of Alan Titchmarsh, there is nowhere he is happier than a bed of strawberries or dahlias. He knows what he is doing, and in this account of one year in the garden, he shares his methods – how to leave a climbing rose lightly pruned until springtime, how to get the best out of tulips, and so on. Occasionally he discusses basic biology, explainin
by Marc Hamer (Harvill Secker £14.99, 416pp)
For more than two decades, Marc Hamer has tended a garden that he doesn’t own. Now he has published what feels more or less like his private gardening journal, in sections with titles such as Pruning Roses, Swifts Arrive and Solstice.
But this is no how-to guide unless perhaps you classify it as a wholly original, semi-autobiographical book on how to live, how to be calm and content with only a little, in a quietly humming garden.
And Hamer knows a thing or two about living with little indeed, living with more or less nothing apart from the ragged clothes he stood up in.