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, explaining what’s happening to plant cells during winter, for instance, or how uric acid improves the soil: “That is why gardeners pee on their compost heaps.”

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