How does your garden grow? Meddling with the soil and what might sprout from it, we hope for a piece of paradise on Earth – in Xanadu, but also in Sidcup and Roath and Lossiemouth. It is necessary to cultivate your garden, Voltaire said, meaning pretty much whatever you’d like. All gardens are plots. They are projects for their gardeners and end up being projections of them too.
Can Marc Hamer’s cultivation of someone else’s garden enlighten us on how to live well today? Green thoughts, Andrew Marvell said, come from any green shade, but Hamer doesn’t stop there.
His first book, A Life in Nature or How to Catch a Mole, also traded in wisdom (and its corrections) got from nature. He is adamant that his gardening the 12 acres belonging to an elderly widow, Miss Cashmere, is “work”. But through his salaried labour comes an almanac of meditations or parables or thoughts-for-the-day, got from dandelions and roses, lawnmowers and secateurs, dead-heading and mulching.
Hamer writes his plants well but finds knowledge awkward. His flower biographies (a striking number are poisonous) include the species’ scientific name, but he resists any other book learning and repeatedly says he knows very little – “I like my head to be clean and empty” – as if it were a spiritual goal to be de-cluttered of facts. He regards knowing the difference between a hawk and a falcon as clouding an encounter with any such bird: “Nature doesn’t waste its time on that.” This is strange (and wrong) – it must limit the breadth of what is written – but it suits Hamer who sees himself more green-man than professional plantsman, someone “horned” and “hooved” in the university of muddy life. It also puts him in the company of farm-labourer John Clare, who said he found his poems in the fields. A story at the heart of Hamer’s book turns on the poet.
We are always in or nearby the garden but Seed to Dust also references Hamer’s hardscrabble “Old North” childhood and early-adult “vagrancy” (a rootlessness felt acutely by the gardener), his love for poetry (“the language of the birds”) that got him bullied and mocked, his discovery of his own creativity after decades of outdoors work silently communing with non-talking existence. And then, more recent and calmer adjuncts to his main narrative, we learn of his writerly life with his writer wife, his dandyish interest in dressing well, a heart health scare, his love for whisky and for his “Buddha” cat: he is a life-hardened man who has made himself soft, we are to understand, a man who has come through.
“When I need to piss I do it on the compost.” I’ve heard the same on Gardeners’ Question Time. Urine helps rot. But Hamer has more work for it. Most of his chapters begin with something actual – a task in hand – before the moment is dug over into a philosophical-ish aperçu. All are well made; some read true, others are squishier. The formula is much repeated. There seem more than enough insights – a glut of soft fruit – and too many come to rest in descriptions of their describer.
The dandelion is his favourite plant. Despite his natty wardrobe, it suits him (“I’m a wildflower, an untidy weed”), but he also knows to grub up the taproots of such troublemakers in an ornamental bed at Miss Cashmere’s. Cue some reflections on the struggles in the life of a working-man up against privilege. Most Hamer meditations take similar forms, starting down to earth, if not actually in it, and ending taking off for the skies one way or another. His prose mimics this, beginning earthy and becoming airy. A good chapter retells the life history of an aphid, then, nearby, Hamer imagines himself a raindrop; on another page he’s the Minotaur. It adds up to a whole heap of curious self-regard in a book ostensibly about the need to shred the self. “I am mud,” he says, then, “I am blossom,” later, “I become the dahlia.”
“I’m on my knees, weeding, and the plants and the soil and I seem to flow into and out of each other,” he writes of the dandelion incident. That airy “flow” is often desired; but Hamer’s more earthed writing is stronger – more brutal, angry even (despite protestations to the contrary) and better for coming through his “rough, grubby fingers”. One time he reaches for his wood-axe from behind his car seat when caught up in a road-rage incident driving home from the garden. He tells this story not entirely against himself.
And Miss Cashmere? Both watch the other – the solitary garden gnome oiling his blades in his shed and the remote but beguiling mistress on her solitary walks to her summerhouse. Here, surely, stalk the ghosts of gamekeeper Mellors and Lady Chatterley. There will be no intimately plaited daisy-chain, but Hamer does persuade Miss C to slip off her shoes to walk barefoot over the lawn that he’s spent decades mowing for her. In return, she’s pruning her bookshelves and passes on her copy of Clare’s poems. More will be made of this.
• Tim Dee’s Greenery: Journeys in Springtime is published by Jonathan Cape. Marc Hamer’s Seed to Dust is published by Harvill Secker (£14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
