Day 16 - Fruits of our labours

I already had my new job, but no real idea of what it would entail. All I could do till I got there was look back over what I was leaving behind.

It had been a snowy winter, at least for a day or two, and naturally I ran out with the camera to capture some shots. A garden always looks best when it is muted by the greens of grass and trees, I find, and the stark white of snowfall is a mere curiosity. Nevertheless, I took a number of pictures which I rarely look at. I think this one of the view south justifies reproduction, though, to give an impression of the setting, which I haven't really made a lot of in my descriptions.

At this time, I had no idea that I would be leaving, and was looking forward to witnessing, along with our visitors, how the garden would develop in its second season. The terrace now had its pear trees in place and they had had their first winter's formative pruning to begin the espalier shape. Beneath were planted the Tulipa 'Shirley', a white, edged with purple flushes and speckles.

These opened out after the pears finished flowering to look like this:

Subtle colouring, attractive, and wasn't going to frighten the rabbits. It certainly wasn't going to frighten the rats. The first year we planted these, we wondered why they weren't coming up in any profusion until we found rodents had lifted and buried most of them in our compost heap for safe keeping. Told you - it's a battle on all fronts. Anyway, I was pretty pleased with this. It was simple and worked well visually, even if they could have done with being planted a bit thicker. When it comes to tulips, buy wholesale and always plant more than you think you have room for. Plant enough for the rats. Then enough for the badgers. And some for the pheasants. And have a few for yourself too.

By the summer the terrace took on a new look, although as far as colour was concerned, it didn't involve major steps in any new direction. The Echium vulgare hybrids provided a pleasing mixture in a range from white through purple to blue.

As for the box hedging that we recycled for the opening ceremony, somewhere along the line, my badgering had won the day, and I had been allowed to replace the ropey ones with new plants, and we had an altogether more pleasing foreground to the south front of the house.

All it needed was a couple of years to grow together. I suppose I was a little sad in the end that I wouldn't be there to see that.

By midsummer the feature pots on the balustrade were beginning to make a show, although I always felt that the hoops in which they hung were too small, and didn't allow for large enough pots to make a significant display. In that, the restorers were governed by actual Victorian remnants, so we had no choice.

And then we come to my lovely walled garden. I wasn't much of a photographer back then, and I didn't have a lot of time to devote to it, flat out as I was with the work itself, so I'm not sure that I really have illustrations that do it justice, but here goes.

The overall effect here is fairly full for a very young garden. The soil was extremely fertile and did a lot of the work for us in terms of promoting growth. A couple of close-ups will show the relatively simple choice of plants used to supplement the period roses which formed the basis for the design.

Here it can be seen that some of the climbing roses were already at the top of the wall, part-way through their second season in the ground.

Of course, it always helps to use fast growing herbaceous plants such as cardoons to give a quick bulk effect, but really, in this garden, there was little need to create such illusions. Everything grew fast.

And that's it. I was leaving the job in my sixth year as a gardener, two of which had been spent as a Chargehand in the parks, and now two more as a Head Gardener in an historic garden. This had been my first proper garden in terms of quality and history, and if I had had time to consider, not only would I have been proud, but I would also have been sorry to be moving on. But I couldn't spare the sentiment. I was progressing to greater challenges, in every sense of the word.

On the way back to my house to start packing, I took in the view of the family cemetery and ruined chapel, and maybe allowed myself to feel a little wistful. But no more.

I returned in 2006 to visit my trusty assistant who was still there. I usually try not to go back, but I indulged myself. Pictures tomorrow.

By the way, don't be shy of the 'follow' button at the bottom of the blog page. It implies that I have no followers. Not true. After I had written four books in this random one day at a time stream-of-consciousness fashion, I shut the blog down for three years while I concentrated on trying to re-establish myself unsuccessfully in the labour market. When I came back to it, the blogspot works seemed to have jammed and although posts are being sent to followers, there is no record of their existence. Similarly, my profile details have become impossible to update, so I have deleted them. But if you find it handy to have the posts delivered to your email inbox, then click 'follow' and you won't have to miss anything ever again. Because I know how much everybody's life needs the sewage of my synapses.

Day 15 - Second place - where the real talent is found

Today's the day. The day when I am going to let you see the imperfect idyll I had sought and was now about to leave behind me. The day when I show you what I was so proud to have created, in a part of the country that felt a bit like home. At any rate as near to home as it gets for a perennially displaced person. Clinging to my roots by my fingertips from forty miles down the road. Yet somewhere in the back of my mind was this nagging voice whispering that that all counts for nothing. Where you are from doesn't make who you are, any more than where you haven't been yet. They are all just places where you spent a night or two, or places where you might. Nothing more. Who you are is in the head you laid on the pillow there. And that is the same wherever you take it. If you are lucky it will be open to influences encountered on the way, it will change and develop. If you are unlucky it will be fixed and rigid and full of its own importance and you might find yourself accidentally elected President one day, much to your surprise and everyone else's. And that's what the world's end looks like. Another story, not for here.

But me, I always have my eyes, ears and nose open for new experiences, I like tasting new foods, touching new things (careful of that one, it gets you into trouble). I can leave behind what is gone, what is used up, move on with no regrets. I made that a guiding principle throughout my life. And here, now, when I have created something beautiful, something I am proud of, where I have made new friends in a place where I am happy, this is where it must end. Where the looking is all forward, and not backward with tears in the eyes.

When I came here, trying to become a proper gardener rather than the hired labour I had been up to that point, I sold a house. Nice little 1930's semi, pretty gardens front and back, with play equipment for the kids that I had built myself, and an elaborate patio I constructed from materials scrapped in the yard at work and delivered by the tree gang, who sometimes were good buddies, and sometimes wanted to kill me. I'm going to show you a picture of that patio. That and the so-called 'feature fireplace' (estate agent speak) built from the same materials were unique selling points of the house.

Obviously, I built the patio level. It must have been the house that was squint. Or the photographer.

All that hard work had netted me £6000 profit on the sale after two years, which seemed like a lot at the time. It gave me the confidence to take a large pay cut to further my career choice and legitimise my gardening. We got through the whole lot within two years of taking up my new appointment, and it became obvious that we were going to go under financially. The answer, as always, was to find a new job. Doesn't matter how much you want to keep the old one, circumstance keeps you moving on. Burning bridges.

I applied for a step up the ladder, By fortuitous coincidence, I spied an advertisement in the horticultural press for a position of Head Gardener/Administrator at the far southern end of our island. This would be the kind of progress I needed, both financially and in terms of autonomy. I would be responsible not only for the garden, but also for the opening arrangements of the property, including the mansion, and for overall supervision of all volunteers and also overseeing the activities of the tearoom. For that I would be paid the extra £3000 a year that I so obviously needed. This one fact probably blinded me to all the pitfalls of such a broad brief, and there was more to come, as I found out later. Not only that, but it was in a much more expensive area to live, so the financial benefits were less advantageous than I first imagined. I got the job, though, partly because the interview panel consisted of one person, who happened to be the good man who had turned me down a couple of years previously for another job, and had written me a letter of encouragement, suggesting that I should keep trying. I found out later that the job had previously been offered to someone else who had, perhaps wisely, turned it down and buggered off to New Zealand. I had seen the advert when it came out for the second time. This was already an established principle for me, as it happens. Most of my best achievements have come from being assessed as second place. I rationalised this as 'top grade, first place - this means that the people judging you feel sufficiently superior to look down on you from above and judge you to be the best on offer. When you come second, this implies that the judges know you've got something, but they're not quite sure what, and are reluctant to commit. Second place is for those the judges don't have the capacity to comprehend.' Anyway, plenty of time for all that. I have months of this left in me, and gems of tangential guidance and self-justification along the way.

Oh. And I lied at the top of the page. I'm not going to show you how my first serious garden developed. Not today. I've sidetracked myself. That will have to wait for tomorrow.

Day 14 - Killer? Or Gorgeous Beast?

It's Sunday today. Weekends are quiet. Not so many people read blogs on Saturdays and Sundays. So the effort is wasted in writing them. Instead, let's take a break from the relentless forward progress of the narrative, even though I know you are dying to see pictures of my lovely first garden as it develops from the initial planting. That will come tomorrow.

In the interim we will have to make do with a summary of what has gone before. I'm not sure what that is really, as I am making this up as I go along, typing every day whatever comes into my head and finding old photographs to back it up. I suppose I have been trying to debunk the myth that gardening is a career for placid, quiet types, who go gently upon their ground plant-whispering their way through an idyllic life, until retirement brings them eternal peace in their allotment, chewing on a piece of straw with string tied round the knees of their breeches. I don't know how it was in years gone by, but it seems from my experience that gardening is an aggressive business, like most other jobs in the modern world. You have to be prepared to fight your corner and have to be steely enough to win your battles, at however great a cost that may be to your mental well-being. You have to be able to fight psychologically, and on occasions you may be called upon to stand your ground physically. You are going to be under attack from outsiders, managers, staff and contractors, and if you are going to make an impression, you have to beat all these off with a big stick. You have to out-arrogant the arrogant, out-threaten the threatening, stand nose-to-nose with the violent and never flinch. Yet at the same time, you have to gently nurture the good guys, the ones who want to learn, the few who love the work as much as you do, and the even fewer who get what it is that you are trying to do, those who understand your vision. I haven't come across many of those in my time. It remains to be seen whether that is a result of the peculiarity of my vision, or the rigidity of horticultural training which holds people back from that last creative leap, as if bungeed to the wall with strong elastic.

The fact is that it is a beautiful job, by far the most complex of all the arts, and once you have recognised that, in order to pursue it, you have to be prepared to lash out at all the unwanted distractions that will come at you trying to undermine your forward progress. You have to be sure of yourself, even in the rarefied, genteel environment of historic gardens. You have to dig in to resist the destructive forces, and you have to be prepared to come out fighting where necessary. I have never had a job where that has not applied, even as a single-handed employee. When you are running a garden which belongs to an organisation, you always have managers who do not understand what it is that you do. Who only see your role in terms of their own professional specialism and who manage you accordingly. On the other hand, this can apply even more in private service, which I vowed right at the beginning of my career never to meddle with. Sometimes we make ourselves promises we cannot keep.

Remember that this is not just a potted history of my career. There are lessons to be learnt here. Lessons about art, about temerity, arrogance even, about how dynamism can make history, but can also destroy it. Keep reading. It will all become clear.

Today's picture is a cartoon. Love and pain among the flowers. It is titled 'Come On You Gorgeous Beast, You're Gonna Have My Babies'. Size approx. 380 x 540mm.

Day 13 - Shooting your own foot. And your mouth off.

Yesterday we arrived at May 12th 1989, the date everyone had planned for. The Grand Opening. But what was going to happen afterwards? Had anybody really thought about that?

There I was, 35 years old, full of testosterone, ambition, ideas and more energy than I knew how to use. With my team, I had built a garden within the prescribed time-frame, in under eight months, and had done it to the best of my ability. That was about to be tested. In fact, we had done it so well that maintaining it was a piece of cake. The occasional stroll through the borders, lifting weeds by hand, some lawns to mow and edge, some hedges to cut, and a couple of small orchards and young fruit trees to be trained.

I started to itch. I craved new projects. I looked at the layout of the grounds. Once upon a time the ornamental garden attached to the house, and the terraces, had been linked to the huge walled kitchen garden next to which I lived, by a woodland walk. This led past a strange quartz rockery, over what in my imagination was a dramatic ravine, then past the ruined chapel and cemetery to finish at the road beyond my house.

To me, it was without question that these areas all formed part of a linked garden continuum which traversed the more natural open areas and native woodlands which formed the rest of the estate.

I wasn't drawn by any revolutionary concept, but I merely felt that to treat the steep sides of the burn as a sort of Himalayan valley to provide colour and ornament to this central feature, and to blend it out gently into the surrounding countryside and woodland, would be to complete the garden that the site demanded.

As the pressure initially had been to ensure that the garden restoration was manageable within the time-frame, it had been decided that these areas should be outside the scope of the garden team, and they had been placed under the care of the forester, with a brief for making it safe, and a small amount of pruning of overgrown laurels. Inevitably, this meant that to make a proper garden out of it, as I saw it, would inevitably lead to conflict between the gardening and forestry departments, both of which shared a line manager. Poor man. He probably suffered, but so did we all. I am still in touch with him, and he is a good person, decent, friendly and considerate. But I had trouble with the forester, and to be fair, he had trouble with me. I'm sure he did good work, and he was there a lot longer than me, but I just found the methods and vision of his department infuriating, uninspired and long-winded. To be honest, I had never understood why an estate which was by now only a remnant could justify the employment of a forester, at only under 50 acres, nor could I endorse the working practices I witnessed. I never understood how it could take till midday to prepare and load the tools for the day, before even setting out to work, however concerned you were about safety. It probably looked aggressive when I started to maintain the neglected grass in the new tree plantings nearer the house which were beginning to look unsightly and were spoiling the effect of the areas nearby which we had just built. I couldn't help that at the time. I had standards I wanted to keep up, and I resented watching what I viewed as lower expectations letting down my work.

I don't know if it was as a result of my pressure, but I was eventually allowed to upgrade the path between the main house and my own, using the two lads from the open prison for labour. It led from the main drive, past the rockery:

I never secured permission to favour this with alpines, but instead was required to allow it to green up naturally, and to manage the weeds to leave the rock exposed. I still think that was a rubbish idea. As indeed was the rockery in the first place, being a poorly-constructed plum-pudding of stark white rocks, set haphazardly and totally inappropriately on the bend of a woodland walk. Still, that's Victorian gardens for you, and this was about the only genuine historic feature that remained. All the rest was a pastiche we had created. A very attractive one, it must be said.

The path was dug out and edged with boards, then infilled with wood-chippings which we acquired on the cheap. It snaked attractively in wide curves and across a bridge over the steep drop to the burn below:

That's my little girl on the bridge.

All in all it was starting to show potential, but it still wasn't making the most of the drama of the site, as can be seen from the next picture, where the extent of the neglect is obvious. To fix this would require an artistic eye to pruning and planting, and I was ready for the challenge.

Unfortunately, the pointless energy-sapping inter-departmental wrangling, coupled with the potential expense of the work meant that this wasn't tackled. Pity, because I reckoned, even without a track record at that time, that I could have done something spectacular on pure energy and a pittance. Never mind, other opportunities would come. But look at the potential. Savour this unexploited opportunity:

Now, I'm not a bad man, but one thing I knew for sure, is that gardens are about people, and if you make your most spectacular natural feature inaccessible to your audience, and fail to enhance it, then you are a waster and a foot-shooter of the worst type. What a shame.

Day 12 - New Heights

Cast your mind back to the 12th May 1989. It was a Friday. Remember what you were doing then? What? No? I thought everybody knew what they were doing the day I was presented to Royalty. Honestly? You don't remember?

Well, I know how it was. Right at the bottom of the pecking order. After all the Management Board, Buildings Advisers, Gardens Adviser and Curators had been given the once-over in the relative comfort of the house, a few of us were lined up against the wall as if facing a firing squad, and I was presented after my Line Manager and the Surveyor, the penultimate obligatory credit, with only the Forester at the end of the queue behind me.

Now, I can laugh and employ sarcastic phraseology all I want, but I've kept the order of proceedings all this time, so it must have meant something, mustn't it? And I suppose it did, although I think I've kept the paperwork more for my kids than myself. Mind you, without it at my fingertips, I couldn't have written this blog post, because I certainly haven't remembered it that clearly after all these years.

I don't recall a firm, enthusiastic handshake. I have no idea what was said, to me or by me. I just have a cloudy recollection of an old lady in blue, wearing her best hat, who looked like somebody's mum. Well, she was, wasn't she? The Queen's. She was also a granny. To him who would be king. If it ever comes to that. Not looking great, is it? Anyway, she flopped her hand into mine, muttered something polite and moved on. And that was it.

I was wearing my best interview suit, £28 from TopShop, and my interview tie, from the same source. I liked that tie. I still have it. It has wings on. At tea after the celebrations, a few of us were sitting at a table, and someone asked, 'Were you in the forces?' I didn't have a clue what he was on about. 'The tie? The wings?' he prompted. Oh. I stumbled for words, and one of the Curators stepped in to my aid and announced 'Flymo Pilot!' I could have been offended. Could have felt patronised. But that is with hindsight. I wasn't quick enough to read it as an elitist comment. I thought it was hilarious, like everyone else, and somehow a vindication of the black arts of the professional horticulturalist. I was sure I would become one of those one day.

As it turned out, he wasn't far wrong. As you can imagine, after two years with the sort of rapid turnover of demotivated, untrained staff, all the machinery was knackered, and to go forward and present the place to an acceptable standard to the visiting public, I had to upgrade the entire stock of machine tools. I bought the Rolls-Royce of greens mowers of the time, the Lloyd's Paladin, replaced the mini-tractor with a bright orange hydrostatic model, bought a flail mower to drag behind it to cut the rough areas, and, quirkiest of all, to give a neat finish to the borders of the main drive, I bought a ride-on Flymo. 30" cut, seat on the back, self-propelled. I loved it. Flymo Pilot. Squadron Leader more like. When I left, I don't think my successor liked any of my choices, and he scrapped the lot, but I knew what worked for me.

It was a good day, though, and a veritable one-off for such a small village. The whole school was invited, and for the kids it was a bit of a pageant. I haven't got a photo with all my family in it on the day, but here's one with the two eldest visible, and me, in my interview suit and tie towering over proceedings. The youngest two are probably in the bushes somewhere, being scallywags.

I won't be accepting a knighthood if I'm put forward by the current government, though. In fact, probably any government, if truth were told. But it's not going to happen, is it? Knighthoods get squandered rather too often on the unworthy. I'll bet you can all think of a few names. No place in that list for a grass-cutter from Liverpool. Who in fact actually originated a mere forty miles up the road from where these photos were taken. Funny business, eh?

Day 11 - Lift-off! Or fork off!

One of the difficulties of doing things on the cheap and staffing your workforce with job creation personnel, is that all your team is there under a certain amount of duress. In other words, they are there because otherwise their benefits would stop. It also means that you can't pick and choose, so that not only will you inherit the inevitable collection of troublesome types, but it is also highly unlikely that you will pick up anybody with any experience. However, in amongst the throng, there will be some gems. That doesn't mean that they make it easy. They all need to be trained, as the work is unfamiliar to them. I'd been through all that when fitting out the walled garden, trying to instil a sense of care and high standards in a group of people many of whom would rather have been at home.

So it was with the next phase of laying out the terrace. This was in part a large turfing job, and nobody at all, apart from me, had ever laid a piece of turf before. But before that there was the path to construct, board edging to put in, hardcore to compact, sand spread on top, and gravel whacked in to that. First, all the compaction had to be relieved where machinery had destroyed the soil structure every day for the previous two years. Borders had to be dug and manured for the pear trees, and the large semi-circle had to have soil imported and levelled prior to turfing, planting the box hedges and laying the gravel. Let's assume that everything went fine. In fact, I don't remember much, other than a row with the topsoil supplier about the poor quality of the product. I no longer remember if we kept it and made do, or got them to uplift and remove. It doesn't matter, the end result was acceptable. Everything was spread, levelled and the box hedges were planted in their semicircles, flanked by areas of fresh turf.

The laying of the turf, however was a bit of a saga. I knew it was coming, and arriving on pallets, to be delivered at the far end of the terrace. Playing upon the charitable status of my employers, I had managed to score the loan of a fork-lift truck from the local nationally-renowned potato processor, and the day the consignment arrived I duly set off to pick the truck up. I don't think it would be possible to do this nowadays. I got dropped off at the factory three miles away and drove the thing back on public roads. I had no fork-lift licence or training, probably no insurance, and the contraption was a law unto itself. Built for tight turns, but also large enough to shift enormous weights, it was huge. Its capricious rear-wheel steering set in motion a random lurching from side to side as I progressed at very few miles per hour down the main road, cars and lorries dodging me, and people on buses pointing and laughing.

When I arrived at the workplace, I struggled to negotiate the back drive, riddled as it was with potholes, and brought the monster to a halt beside the assortment of pallets at the end of our newly-constructed terrace path. The trouble was, the forklift was designed to do its stuff on hard, level factory floors, and had zero ground clearance, so as soon as I tried to make it climb the slight slope of our gravel path, it dug itself in and sulked till we gave up. This was a big blow, as not only would we have to reconstruct that part of the path, but we would also have to manhandle the turf from one end of the terrace to the other, and various points in between. This made the estimated time for the job unrealistic, and it became clear that we wouldn't be finished for the weekend. Obviously, we didn't want the grass lying there, yellowing in its rolls, over the weekend, so I enlisted  the help of one of the squad to come in and help me finish up on Saturday and Sunday on promise of time off in lieu. A good man, but generally unreliable, time off seemed to be the sort of carrot he would devour willingly. Between us we got the job done, and I must say, simple in effect though it was, it didn't look bad.

The box hedges were mostly recycled remnants that we had chopped back and saved. They looked rough when newly planted, but soon developed into a reasonable feature. One of the problems about working for charities is the lack of a budget. Don't buy new, if you've got one already, half dead but recoverable with care and skill. I learned a lot through that approach.

In the picture above the pots on the steps can be seen in their newly-planted state. and there is a rare rear view of a gardens adviser helping with the watering. That's the one on the right.

And don't forget how it had looked a few weeks before.

Tomorrow we'll see the Grand Opening. Bate your breath!

Day 10 - Escape from Slavery

It's not easy getting this stuff right. You probably picture me as some sort of aphid, reproducing itself parthenogenetically. Some sort of supreme being, single-handedly working like a colony of ants while bringing up a troupe of kids he has made all by himself. But no. They have a mum. The thing is, when couples divorce, it often means they have decided that they no longer want to be a part of each other's lives. And I am sure the last thing my ex-wife wants is to be plastered all over the internet in my memoir. You have to respect that sort of thing, or else you are as bad at divorce as you were at marriage in the first place. Although there will be no further mention of this, let it be known at this point, that as far as marriage is concerned, I am no holocaust denier.

But what do you do it all for? All this work? Well, for me, responsibility came as a bit of a shock. I was used to working for a while and using the proceeds in order not to have to work for another while. It felt like a compromised freedom. I still had to work, but not all the time. Then I became a student and that was even better. It was only necessary to work when the deadlines approached. Then I became a dad, and all that changed. I had to find a way of earning enough to provide for six of us and two dogs. That's the situation I've reached in this story. It is also the very thing that began to dictate my approach to the work. Let it be said here that I hate with a passion the concept of working for wages. It is a form of slavery however you look at it. And here I was, committed to it for the foreseeable and unforeseeable future. My internal organs were rebelling. I had to find a way to make it bearable. The way I did that was by slowly developing the philosophy which dictated my approach to gardening. A philosophy which allowed me to take pleasure and derive pride from my labours. To begin with, I didn't know I was doing this. It crept up on me gradually. I went from one who enjoyed hard work in the open air because of the luxurious sensation of fatigue it granted me at the end of the day, to one who was beginning to enjoy the process along the way. I began to see the creative potential of what I was doing. I took an interest in the plants, immersed myself in the pictures, the sculptural aspects of the job. Listened to the hoverflies humming. Lost myself in the syrupy atmosphere and the beauty of the environment. Slowly, the wages began to seem like a bonus, and not the purpose of the whole enterprise. It was going to work out.

So where were we? We had just completed planting the walled garden. It was young and newly-mulched, but there was a way to go. The stonemasons were gradually working their way out from my precious garden, and they had left behind a piggery of squashed and ruptured soil, lying under pools of stagnant water, and I had to create an ornamental terrace from it. Remind yourselves of how it looked.

The idea was to create a gravel path running the 200 yard length of the terrace. Running alongside it, a strip of turf, backed by a narrow border under the wall, which would contain a simple planting of Echium vulgare in the summer and massed Tulipa 'Shirley' in the spring. On the wall itself, trained on wires, would be varieties of espalier-trained pear trees. The central semicircle would be planted out with box hedging, and a unique historic feature would be reinstated on the steps up to the house - a cascade of pots with ornamental summer plants held in hoops welded to the balustrade.

This was a bigger job than I would have wished for, involving the purchase of screened topsoil in vast quantities, which came unscreened and riddled with bindweed. The rest is probably a story for tomorrow, but keep this picture in mind till then. The finished product will be a revelation.

Day 9 - Something for the weekend?

It certainly wasn't all work. Family life kept going on behind the scenes. We settled into the cottage. I managed to scrounge up permission to create a bit of private garden by the house to grow some flowers, some vegetables and to keep chickens and my bees. That didn't work out too well, in the long run, the bee-keeping. I developed an allergy to the stings and would get flu-like symptoms which would keep me off work, so after a while I had to have them rehomed.

In between the furiously hard work against punishing deadlines, it was a good life, all that we had been hoping for, in fact. It was a good strong house -

even though my atrocious photography makes it appear to be tipping over. The school was just up the road, as can be seen from this picture taken from the house, all the kids went there together and formed a sizeable contingent amongst the 24-strong total of pupils.

Our own garden developed rapidly - I couldn't get enough of hard work back then, and it didn't occur to me to broaden my leisure-time interests beyond gardening. Actually I do myself an injustice, because I was also a member of a local amateur dramatic group and the local amateur operatic society, which allowed my other need to find expression - the craving to perform. More of that later. Anyway, we had plenty of eggs from the Blackrock hens, I had bees to look after, and also ferreting rights on the estate, as well as a bit of fruitless sea-fishing off the rocks now and then, not to mention all the children's activities that ate up time. I slept soundly for a couple of years as far as I remember.

I've still got that hat! Sheepskin. Far too bloody hot to wear.

Not beautiful or particularly artistic, perhaps, but productive, and kept me away from any temptation to behave badly. And the kids loved it, with a huge walled garden full of sheep to play in, just behind that tall wall.

At least it looked like they were enjoying it, even in a posed photograph by the front door -

So let us imagine this post as a sort of weekend off, where I have left work behind for a couple of days, and am relaxing with the family. That is how it was.

Day 8 - Small steps are best

Time to get serious. Time to return to the past tense. No more of this terror of failure in the present. This is a fait accompli, done and dusted, part of my history, and I didn't fall on my face. I blagged my way from strength to strength. And I have photographic evidence. So no more of this schoolboy whingeing about not being up to the mark. It's not me. I've put the mark in the wrong place. Put it where I have to over-reach. The game is to set your goals to be attainable. Progress by small increments till, looking back, you seem to have made a large leap. The beginning of lesson 2 in my gardening philosophy - the most lasting changes are often small developments, not seismic disruptions to the whole fabric of the art. Those may well be no more than mere fashions. Be insidious, I say, be small. That's what will make them itch. The grand outpouring may just make everybody laugh. Do you want to be an Emperor of a collapsing dynasty, gesticulating in impotent rage, with no trousers on, a figure of ridicule? Fine, that may be your thing. There are always conceptual gardens for you to play with.

None of which means that I didn't remain cautious at this time. Look at yesterday's photographs. I marked out the borders, but rather than lifting the turf all at once, I cut an outline of turf a couple of inches wide, just enough so I could see it from the roof of the mansion and check if everything was symmetrical. I was leaving nothing to chance. If I had got it wrong, I would be able to slip the turf back in the slots and make adjustments. As it turned out, I had got it right first time. Now was the time to commit. To remove all the turf from the beds and incorporate copious quantities of compost into the soil. It was in fact good, rich arable soil, characterised by large cobblestones which were to be found in the process of digging. The addition of compost was to make a potent mix. In the second season after planting, the delphiniums grew to over ten feet high, and could be seen above the wall of the garden from the terrace below. For me that was living proof of the value of preparation. The garden would have grown fine with no additives, I am sure, but if I am going to adopt old wisdoms, then I want to see them proven. Never trust anything you are told, until you have tested it yourself. I began learning that on this job, by the shovel-load. This picture seems to show all the processes at once, which is not as I remember it - turf removal, digging, manuring. The turf was, of course, re-incorporated into the bottom of the trenches when digging the beds. All that lovely fibre. Good guys in this pic, me second from left.

Anyway, by the time we had reached this stage, progress began to speed up. The technical stuff was done, the shapes had been measured and marked. It was just a question of plugging away at the hard labour of it, finishing off by the raking and levelling of each bed. That's something you have to get right, particularly when much of the digging has been done by an inexperienced team, and could be quite uneven. I did the raking myself. The other thing that was going on here was that I was trying to train the lads to do the work without causing damage or making a mess, hence the polythene sheeting. It may seem like a small point, and far too many people don't bother with it, but if you tip soil over your grass, then you introduce weed seeds into your lawn and starve the grass of light. You turn your green backdrop into sludge, and if you run wheelbarrows over it repeatedly you kill the sward by compacting the roots and give yourself one of the most tedious repair jobs in the business. The answer is simple. Take care, don't make a mess, protect your ground, work off planks where possible, and above all, THINK. Remember that word. It is behind everything I will be saying in the course of this tale.

After a while the beds were dug and we constructed a central gravel walkway linking the perimeter path across the middle, where a structure for climbing plants was planned. We dug out the lavender beds that would form the base of this central frame. Then we began planting. You can have no idea the feelings of excitement, pride and joy this all brought about in the young man I was, embarking on his first real creative post in the horticultural world. All right, the design wasn't mine, but everything else was, and that was a hell of a good start, and a massive kick up the confidence ladder.

Looking good, turf much improved after fertilising, no mess anywhere and roses in place. Path across centre under construction with board-edging in place and hardcore infill begun. A little further down the line the firm that made the custom climbing frame for the central rose feature installed it, causing surprisingly little damage to the work beneath, which we had rashly started in advance of the structure arriving.

The small round beds were an unusual yet simple feature of five standard Rosa mundi in a carpet of catmint, and the larger petal-shaped beds contained monocultures of Victorian Hybrid Perpetual Rose varieties such as 'Baroness Rothschild' and 'Reine des Violettes'. These were early repeat-flowering types that were of the period and could be relied on to give a reasonable show over the summer season. The outer beds next to the walls were mixed plantings of herbaceous plants and once-flowering shrub roses, with climbing roses paired with varieties of Clematis trained against the walls on wires. Two of the shrub roses I came to love in particular were the rugosa hybrid, 'Fimbriata' and the China rose hybrid, 'Mutabilis'.

These were the days when no one was yet worried about the destruction of peatland habitats, and as you can see from the photo below, the final touch we put on the beds was to mulch heavily with peat. The young lady entrusted with the job was the only woman on the job creation team, and I eventually took her on as my full-time assistant. She is still there, over thirty years later.

As for the peat issue, there will be more to say about that later. For the moment, I was only learning about the perils of such extravagance. And I was no worse than anybody else.

Day 7 - The Art of Dissemblance

Now, I've arrived at this new job, and I like the look of it. It's in a beautiful setting, the kids will grow up in peace and quiet, away from the hurly-burly of city life. We can all relax and breathe out. And in again. Repeatedly. This is it. This is what we've been waiting for. True, I'm being paid a pittance, and I have to keep six of us and a couple of dogs on that, but we'll manage, surely. That's the least of my worries. My main concern is that I have never undertaken a project like this, however much I managed to big up my experience on my application and at interview. I've got to get to grips with what I am supposed to be doing. It looks simple enough. The main thing is to get the bits around the house looking good in time for the Royal opening. The further reaches can wait a while, no need to worry about landscaping the steep sides of the burn at this stage, no need to worry about the ruined chapel and family cemetery yet, or the original walled kitchen garden against which my house is set. Those are projects for later, for when the rest of it is done and I am starting to get bored.

Right, so where do I start? Obviously the little ornamental walled garden attached to the house. It has been in use for the last twenty years or so as a rough patch for breeding pheasants for the guests in the hotel to annihilate. But it's not a hotel any more. It has to look like a country house. Those in power have decreed that although it is an 18th century building, the period to be commemorated will be the Victorian era, when the house was at its height, and for which more information and original artefacts are available. That means a Victorian-style garden,. The Gardens Adviser has come up with a design based loosely on an old photograph, and although less fussy, it is a reasonable approximation for a modern audience to enjoy. My first task is to learn all the plants I have to use and pretend I know all about them. All my experience has been with plants in use in the present day, but the list I have here has been selected to be appropriate to a garden a century old. In the council, I have never had access to old-fashioned shrub roses, nor to the Victorian varieties of bedding roses. I am horrified when I look up the rules for pruning them. Every one seems to belong to a different category and needs different treatment. Some you just take the tips out, some you remove a third of the growth, some about half, there is renewal pruning thrown in there, and before all of that I will have to learn which class of rose each plant belongs to. Additionally, I will be pegging the bedding roses down to cover the ground more fully, and I've never done that before. Every evening I am at the plans and books, studying hard so as not to fall on my face, let down by my performance.

The first bit is easy, in fact, because I have come to the garden after the pheasant pens and rough grass and wire netting have been swept away by my predecessor, and I have a sort of starved lawn, surrounded by a rough path and long, deep beds around the perimeter beneath the wall. My first job, and it will be a big one, an achievement fought for against the incursions of the stonemasons, will be to mark out the beds in the turf, and dig and manure them prior to planting. I can do this. Marking out shapes on grass is something I can do. Every Friday on the council I used to mark out sixteen football pitches. I also did hockey and rugby pitches, athletics tracks and cricket wickets. I can mark out. No worries.

It is amazing how quickly a garden begins to take shape once you take the plunge.

I could keep up this pretence for a couple of months. We had the whole area to dig, manure to incorporate in lorry-loads, we had the terraces to construct and turf. In the interim, I could look as if I knew what I was doing. I looked like a professional. I looked like this:

I could keep up appearances for a while. No one would see the panic as I slowly sank under the weight of my own ignorance. Fortunately, the only people who knew the difference were based elsewhere, and I only saw them rarely. The team I worked with were clueless as to the level of my inexperience. That's the great thing about being a gardener. Nobody really knows what you do. As long as you look busy, you'll be all right. I always looked busy. And all my spare time I had my nose in the books, learning how to bluff better.

Day 6 - Building a career

So, I get to my new job, and it feels like I've made it. Comes with a fine vernacular cottage attached to a disused walled kitchen garden, now being grazed by sheep. All four kids will go to the village school, a couple of hundred yards up the road past the church. 24 pupils in all, one in six will be mine. Nice little remnant of an estate, rescued from life as a sporting hotel, preparing for its next phase as a museum. Views onto big water, nature reserve. Like a pure injection of fresh air for this country boy who has been living in city exile for most of his life.

I'm replacing a supervisor who has done a lot of the rough clearance work, but his year in the Job Creation scheme is now up, so they have employed a qualified professional. That's me. Beats me how I manage to convince them of that. I have a couple of weeks overlap with my predecessor before taking over his team of government-created gardeners. The overlap is worthless. I wish he'd just bugger off so I can get started doing things my way. When he does go, I find he has had a good crack at sabotaging my reputation by telling the team that I'm 'just a grass-cutter from Liverpool'. Same mistake my previous gang made. Underestimation. I may not have much to give at this time, but when it comes to potential, the sky's the limit, and I'm a fast learner.

Turns out that, far from being a civilised idyll where I can parade around in beautiful surroundings like a Head Gardener of old, I am back to square one. I have a renegade gang of demoralised long-term unemployed, all of whom didn't like their previous supervisor, or the work. In addition, there is a separate similar squad of stonemasons, with their own supervisor, and various inter-gang rivalries and tensions. Gradually it becomes evident that there are a few good guys in the team who respond to being treated with respect, and I begin to build up a core of allies who are glad to be trusted with responsibilities. Nevertheless there are others who don't want to work, but spend all their time being disruptive. One such goes too far one day, upsetting other members of the team. He has turned in late for work after a night in the cells pursuant to a drunken pool-cue attack in a local bar, and has a pugnacious hangover. I know words won't do any good. He has already shown himself to be beyond reason on numerous occasions, so I have to humiliate him by overpowering him and wrestling him to the ground in front of his peers. I nearly lose my job over that, as in the genteel environment of Historic Houses, this kind of behaviour is felt to be inappropriate. More to the point, my polite managers have likely not seen such before, and are unaware that it happens in workplaces all over the land. I do know this. I have previous. I have encountered this behaviour repeatedly, and believe I know how to deal with it. Management, however, are at a loss as to how to cope.

It doesn't get any easier later, when we start using prisoners approaching their parole date for extra free labour. My two do great work, but again we have two teams, and they form factions. My two knife attackers against the forester's wife-murderer and armed robber. Did you think gardening was for quiet, contemplative, even reclusive, types? Think again. It's a tough world out there. A constant battle.

So, it is a continuing lesson in handling people. It is also where I encounter for the first time something which dogs me throughout my career. The tension between builders and gardeners. Generally builders don't get it when the gardener gets upset by damage. Standard practice is to go on site, trash the area in the construction process and leave the landscapers to sort it out after the real work is finished. Gardens can be repaired. That's what everyone thinks. And it's true. But, on the receiving end, we tend to think, 'why should we fix it?' We've only just made it beautiful, and some inconsiderate bastard drives all over it with his dumper truck, floods it, compacts it, dumps concrete rubble on it, and we have to start all over again.

So it is with the bloody stonemasons. I'm creating an ornamental walled garden for the grand opening, on an eight-month deadline, and they're wash-pointing the walls. This is a technique where the pointing consists of mortar made up with crushed sea-shells, and you have to trickle water over it with a hose afterwards before it sets, to bring the shells to the fore. There is no communication between the teams, and a largely absent supervising mason, so we have to guess. Where we think they have finished an area, we dig the borders beneath, then they come back, gouge it all out because they have done a bad job, trample our beds underfoot, and pour wet mortar all over our work. This goes a long way towards teaching me to work cleanly, because if there's one thing I hate, it's cleaning up afterwards. Lesson 1 in my rules for creating a work of art - clear up as you go, don't make a mess, take care, work gently on your ground. And keep away from builders.

Image - the legacy of building works:

Make a garden out of that.

Day 5 - Humble beginnings

Now, I know this is going to be about the development of a theory of how gardens work as art, but the arrival there is gradual, and I feel it is necessary to start from the beginning with a sort of horticultural autobiography. So let's backtrack a bit. I paid my dues.

My first job was for £42 a week on a job creation scheme. As an ex-student of languages and former Trainee Accountant, I wasn't looking favourite for even this lowly position, and after eighteen months unemployed, doing what I termed 'voluntary work', it looked like another opportunity was going to pass me by. I saved the day by showing the panel my calloused hands, and asking 'do they look like the hands of an office boy?' In truth, my 'voluntary work' had had a positive effect on my soft hands, even though it largely involved doing stupid things like sitting in trees pruning branches on my own, using a Victorian two-man saw. I got the job, though. All's well that ends. Well.

I had to walk six miles to work and six miles back each day, and the team I was working with was pretty wayward. The establishment was a five-acre organic smallholding on sand, where we grew vegetables for the benefit of trainees with learning disabilities.

The boss was an older bloke, whose sole qualification was that he had had an allotment for years. He let it be known that his nickname was 'Big Dick'. Say no more. He was off one day, so with the promise of a liquid lunch, I got the lads to dig most of an acre of potato field. It was easy-digging sandy soil, and they got quite fired up. Went at it like the clappers, intent on proving a point. Boss came back next day, made us do it again, because I had got them to use forks, and he wanted it done with spades. So they spent the next few days digging all the weeds they had turned under back up to the surface again, and much slower, with spades. My first lesson in the pointlessness of leaving tradition unchallenged. We had done a much better, faster and more efficient job with forks.

The other lesson I learnt there, although it never sank in as a guide to good practice, was when I let it slip that I liked cutting hedges. I was given a mixed country hedge to cut with hand shears, and took the trouble to make a neat job of it. Apparently I took too long making it look good, and should have just done a rough job to keep it in check. Well, a rough job has never appealed to me, so I never changed my approach as a result of that. As for speed, it was the first I'd ever done under the stop watch. I would get faster in time, no doubt, and learn a few things about the right tools for the job.

Mind you, all the walking and working meant that I was sleeping well, and I was enjoying this new life. I began to get interested in learning more, so I snagged a weekend job in a Garden Centre, where I started learning about plants. They were good to me there, and let me plant worse-for-wear plants around the car park as well as my other duties.

Meanwhile, I carried on at the farm, where it became clear that it was necessary to prove myself as a 'man', which generally involved swearing and drinking a lot, and fighting. It was a bit like lion cubs testing themselves against the opposition, without malice, but you had to make the grade. Apparently I was pretty fast in the wrestling, and passed the test. Swearing and drinking I was already a master of. Good thing, or my future might have been very different.

That lasted a year, at the end of which I got a job with the council, working in parks. It was a dismal, aggressive environment, where hardly anybody liked gardening, almost nobody wanted to work, and the slightest sign of moisture sent everybody scurrying to the mess-room to be rained off and play poker. I like a game of poker. It was about the only bit of the job I did like.

The few of us who showed any inclination at all towards gardening were selected to be sent to day-release to do our City and Guilds in Decorative Horticulture, and I showed a bit of aptitude, so at the end of that I was signed up for the Master of Horticulture. All this meant that someone high up had seen some potential in me, and I was fast-tracked for promotion. The Manager responsible for this was a hated figure, accused by the lads of hiding in bushes and spying on them, so I was naturally by association also widely despised as an upstart brown-noser, which couldn't have been further from the truth. My rise to level of Chargehand was not popular, particularly as it was over the heads of others who had been there for twenty years and more. No one seemed to appreciate that the fact that these same people had been prosecuted in the past for their workplace activities might be a hindrance to their advancement. It was the sort of environment where giving an unpopular instruction would result in someone trying to back a dumper truck over you. A place where it was not unheard of for a gang of men to tie a rope to one of their colleagues and haul him forty feet up a tree and leave him there for the whole day, not knowing if they would come back to release him. It was an intimidating atmosphere, and sabotage was rife. Anything to get out of work. Brand new scarifiers would be adjusted to dig huge gouges in the bowling greens. It was a test for me, based on the assumption that I knew nothing because I was new. It took about a minute to readjust the machine to the right settings, and no one tried that one again. But it was hard going, and I spent most of my four years there depressed, looking for the next, hopefully better, step forward in my career, and a more favourable start for my family.

It became clear that the M.Hort. would lead to a desk job, which I didn't want, as I loved hard work and plants, so I started looking at jobs which were, frankly, beyond my ability at that time. I aimed for Head Gardener jobs in Historic House Gardens. I didn't really know enough about it to know how limited my knowledge was for this kind of work, but eventually my perseverance paid off despite that, and I had my first offer - to construct a garden from scratch in Scotland. I had eight months to complete it before a Royal opening. I felt like I had arrived. More on that tomorrow.

Meanwhile, a leaving presentation had been arranged at the Council Depot. This was an unexpected surprise. Most of the twenty-five lads turned up, partly because it had been arranged for lunchtime, when they would mostly be back anyway, and partly because they would attend anything which involved a few minutes off work. I was handed a present and instructed to open it. The guy sitting beside me muttered under his breath 'fucking awful clock', and he was right. Cheap, plastic shiny gold-coloured carriage clock from Argos. I didn't take it with me to my new home.

Day 4 - Respect 2

Of course, I'm coming at this from a particular standpoint. I've worked in a very specific branch of the business. My views come from the experience of employment in historic gardens open to the public, and owned by charities for the benefit of the nation; from an attempt to emulate the achievements of the great Head Gardeners of the past, but in a modern world where labour is not cheap. That comes with very particular challenges, and a dedicated team is essential. So is a love of presenting your work to an audience.

However, I also recognise that there are many other branches of the discipline, all with their merits for different personalities. And there are first-rate practitioners in all these disciplines, all deserving of respect, and mostly receiving it in very limited doses. So hats off to all the dedicated landscapers, nurserymen, arborists, conservationists, commercial horticulturalists, designers and maintenance gardeners, whose enthusiasm leads to quality work. And a large raspberry to all the half-arsed freeloaders whose sloppy workmanship lets/drags us all down.

If you're a client out there, then remember that what we do is a skill that you probably haven't got, even if you think you have, so don't price us cheap as if we were unskilled labourers. We have spent a lot of time on the bread line to reach this level. On the other hand, don't assume that a high price means we are any good either. We may just have shrewd business practices like dodgy car salesmen (this is in no way to denigrate the honourable motor trade, which also exists). Do your research, look at the work, find the quality. It is out there for whatever service you require. It can just be obscured by a lot of people who think it's an easy living and are getting away with it. Find the right people and treat them with respect. Allow them to know more than you and you will be rewarded.

So, how was it for me? Well, in fact, the earth moved. I was a mature student embarking on an academic career, desperate to write, in as many languages as possible. I was on a study year abroad, head so bursting with ideas that I couldn't sleep properly. Then the village Fire Brigade felled a 100 year-old pear tree outside our little Gartenhaus, and I told the landlady I'd dig out the stump for her. 26 years old, never done any gardening in my life. Landlady looked sceptical. Several weeks later the stump was out, split with wedges, soil backfilled and a new lawn sown. I've never slept so well. That was my first lesson, and it was a powerful one. I had learned that I loved physical labour.

After a series of reverses in my fortunes, the academic life dropped out, and faced with harsh choices, I became a gardener, almost by accident. My career continued to be favoured by chance, and I soon found myself being absorbed at Head Gardener level by charitable organisations caring for country houses open to the public. It was always my intention to steer clear of the risks associated with working for private landowners. By luck, I seemed to drift into a specialised area of the work which suited me well, and I made my career in gardens which formerly had had quality, but either had descended or were descending into dereliction, from which sorry state it became my duty to rescue them. These were gardens which no one had found a solution for and which the owners had all but given up on. I was a sort of last-chance reprieve for the places in which I worked. This inevitably meant that I had considerable freedom of interpretation within the historic context, as no one else was able to devote much time to supervising what I did to such lost causes. I began to be trusted. As my confidence grew, this became very liberating. At first, of course, I was way out of my depth, a bit of a council-trained chancer in the company of highly-qualified Botanic Garden educated colleagues. That was quite intimidating early on, until it began to dawn on me that there were many different ways to interpret the brief, and that mine was as valid as anybody's.

Be in no doubt - gardening is many things, one of which is an interpretive art, like music or theatre.

Day 3 - Respect

So how do people get into gardening anyway? Unlikely you jumped at it when the careers adviser drew it out of the hat. It's usually the last-resort offer to the educationally undistinguished. It comes with a stigma as a lifestyle choice. True, I have known some who drifted into it after failing at school, and they have found it to be a revelation. Some are now Head Gardeners in their own right, even experts in their chosen specialism, garnering the respect of fellow anoraks across the globe. Botanical Latin is no obstacle once you've been grabbed.

By the same route, others graduate into the people that most of us see, the ones who, by association, compromise the reputations of the true professionals. You know, those for whom all shrubs are destined to become lollipops, the 'why-use-secateurs-when-a-chainsaw-will-do' types, who, when it comes to chemicals, will splash it all over like Henry Cooper's Brut. Those ones the non-gardeners hire when their garden looks like a cross between the Somme and a rainforest, only only to see it rapidly become a desert under their ministrations. These are the people who essentially hate work, and come to gardening because, like far too many people, they believe anybody can do it. And the customers who keep them in business think that too, because, let's face it, everybody's a gardener, don't you think? If you have a patch out the back, a spade in the shed, you know what it's all about, don't you?

And of course, now that the garden centre is one of the few places you can get into for a pensioners' lunch on your mobility scooter, an older generation is getting seduced by the latest colourful offers, but then, unable to do the work, is hiring these charlatans, who kill the reputations of the skilled professionals by the ubiquity of the offences they perpetuate.

Me, I came to it out of a desire to communicate. Ex-linguist, wannabe multilingual writer, failed. So I'm going to have a different take, aren't I? Pompous, up myself, arty-farty git, you may think. Could be right, but I had no other choice. It's how I'm made.

But call yourself a gardener, and few people see that. Most will see a menial, someone getting paid for a job they could perfectly well do themselves, if they only had time. Because everyone's a gardener, right? In fact, those people will come to visit the gardens where professionals work, on sunny weekends, and really believe they could do it. They will approach us and say with a smile that reflects their originality, 'you can come and do mine after', or 'you must have a lovely job, I could see myself doing that'. And I think, 'in your dreams', because the vocation of a true gardener is not a fine-weather occasional pleasure when the time feels right. It's a seven-day a week commitment every day of the year, even Christmas, snow, frost, deluge or gale. You are constantly planning ahead, one, two, three seasons in advance. It shortens your life, takes your future before it happens. You are responsible for life and death, you have an obligation to provide the best at all times for those whose leisure involves enjoying your work. You are bound by history, yet also focussed on development and history yet to come. You are mindful of security, safety, profitability. You need to understand the use and maintenance of machinery. Oh yes, and you need to know about gardening, which is a lifelong study discipline in itself. And all that's before we even begin to think about art.

So, please, don't make the mistake of thinking you can do it. Most of you can't, because what the hobbyist does in the privacy of the home bears no relation to what a professional does for a living. Believe me, I know - I've tried explaining my methods to a lot of professionals who don't get it either. And that's a story for later, dealing with training and rules and flexibility.

Day 2 - The Greatest Pest

Then there is the mole in his cheap velour jacket, conjuring mini-earthquakes in your silken sward - what is his place in all this? Does he rightly tremble in his subterranean labyrinth at the tumultuous echo of your boots marching overhead? Or the unconsummated rabbits skittering to cover at your approach, the pushy little squirrel alerted by your cumbersome and vociferous presence, and the white-rumped roe deer, the thief in the night, Vandal, Hun or Visigoth - all natural disasters attacking your creation. Add to all this the multicoloured aphid, caterpillars, earwigs, even the handsome bullfinch that strips the buds from your fruit trees, or worse still, diseases - honey fungus, box blight, dutch elm disease, take-all patch - the list grows year on year. Then comes the weather. Rain, wind, frost, snow, fire, all out to destroy your precious masterpiece without even a thought for the beauty you have made. You will find that nature has no purpose in your garden. Unless you can manage it.

Your garden is an artificial construct. Nature will pull it apart. You can't get rid of nature, but yet you still want your garden. You have the temerity to believe you can do better than nature. That you have the power to re-order natural materials and make a more pleasing picture. You can be god in your own patch, and you assume that right. This is not about the morality of such self-aggrandisement. I'm assuming self-importance as a given. What we are dealing with here is the consequences of that. How to make its impossibility work. Human arrogance is not something I feel qualified to take on. Some might see this as the greatest garden pest.

Day 1 - I randomly choose September in the garden.

What camera can capture the glorious glint of the dragonfly as it skips through the steaming air over the pond on thinner-than-tissue wings? Only the frozen still-frame, perhaps, the fractionless moment that the naked eye cannot distil, motion chopped into sections of science. Even the video camera as it tries to follow the mesmerising flight pattern, deliberately pointed as it is, fails to register the surprise and joy of the insect's sudden arrival or the scarce-contemplated longing in its absence.

A garden, then, filled with yearning, an enfolding place that comes at you from behind, unexpectedly, when your limitations are directing your eyes to the front.

And that sweet soporific perfume that bathes you now in the languidly falling September sun, can it really be that ragged and unassuming bush, Abelia chinensis, which you were about to pass by with barely a glance?

Or when your conversation pauses, and the peaceful silence descends, are you startled to find it suddenly filled with the gentle crackling of a thrush devouring snails and the withering leaves tapping lightly on the turf with every late-summer gust, amid the perpetual drone of hoverflies feeding and the flies that taste the pearls of perspiration on your brow?

You may bend to prise the velvet leaf from a Salvia argentea and stroke it against your cheek, or chew a plump blackberry from a rogue bramble which someone failed to weed from a hedge.

You may do all these things and in the process stimulate all five senses. You may experience a profound sense of peace and satisfaction. It could be that you will feel you have communed with nature, that you are at one with the world.

But no, for this is a garden - a place where you will meander past beds where a plant from Chile seems to grow harmoniously touching its neighbour which is endemic to an obscure mountain location in China. In the springtime, the same soil shared by their roots is littered with flowering bulbs from otherwise barren Turkish hillsides, and the whole display is overshadowed by and enormous North American oak, whose scarlet plumage in the fall is fluttering piece by piece now to land around your feet. And what's that there? - a man-made hybrid, sterile, grafted, existing only as long as you value it enough to perpetuate it.

No, this is not nature, it is a garden, an ideal representation of how someone would like nature to be. It is false, it is artificial, it is against nature. It is a work of art.

(Don't forget, when you have read this, that this is just the first part in the story of a professional gardener. If you want to delve deeper, and enjoy anecdotes, tips, humour and a straightforward nose into someone else's life story, then you need to go to the top of the page, and click on the links for Day2, Day 3, Day 4 etc, preferably in the right order. Even if Day 1 didn't particularly appeal, the rest of it might, as each post is different).