Q: How did this book come about? A: We all remember the lockdown… We had no idea when that would end. We really had no notion of what was going on. It was all completely unknown… My then publisher said to me, why don’t you write about what is around you, the flowers of the Himalaya, so that people like me who are in a house in the middle of London will get to wander those mountains, at least in our minds, even though we are physically not allowed out. And I had plenty of mind blocks against that. The main one was that I am not a botanist… But I sort of began to make notes on particular plants anyway. But as soon as I started doing that, I realized that I couldn’t separate the plants from the people around them or the animals who grazed on them and prevented them from growing, or the animals who did. So the whole book became more about my entire surroundings than only about the flowers. And I was all along painting as well. Q: Gardening has been at the core of your being. A: As I say in one of the essays chapters in the book, my father was an extremely dedicated gardener. Wherever we went, we moved in our life to all sorts of places because he was a geologist and he would keep moving. And from my earliest life, I remember he’d come back from his field surveys with dried leaves, fossils, all sorts of things from the earth. And then when he began to be posted in small towns. All through after that, in each place, in a house we would rent, he would create a garden which would have vegetables, flowers, all sorts of things. And however small the area, he would really manage to create a lovely, growing, thriving garden into which birds would come. And my mother would feed these birds and give them water… In my student room (at university) I found that I had plants where mostly people just had posters… And when we came to the mountains, I finally had a patch of earth instead of flower pots on a veranda. So that’s when it actually began. Q: There’s a gentleness and a tremendous sense of peace. A: When we came here, the small patch of land around the house was completely covered in garbage, to which was added the waste from whatever repair, reconstruction we had to do. It was absolutely barren apart from nettles and weeds. And everybody assured me that nothing would grow here because it’s north facing, it’s not got much sunshine, it has huge deodar trees right around the house which form a canopy and the whole place gets showered by pine needles all through the year. So I often came up against absolute walls and frustration, trying so hard to grow things and failing again and again. But even in that, I think what I read later was that if you put your hands into soil, there’s a particular kind of bacteria that comes into contact with your skin and that creates a chemical response in your body that leads to feelings of contentment or peace. So I think it was this connection with the soil that kept me going in the garden and which keeps me going as a potter too. Q: I love the way you narrate the belief in yourself and the determination with which you kept pulling up all kinds of muck. A: One of the people I quote in that chapter about the soil is Anna Pavord. Her most famous book is about the tulip, but she’s written many, many other books about gardening and plants. She had cancer and had to have quite a lot of surgery and treatment, which left her inside the hospital for a long time. And she narrates how the first thing she did when she was able to get up was to crawl along the floors of the hospital to the outside, where she managed to touch some soil in the garden. And this is what made her feel as if she could go on. Q: You started writing this when all of us had that collective grief of Covid; you’realso remembering people like your father who got you onto this track. A: I have been trying for years to work out in my head how to write about a garden in terms of the people who are in it, not physically, but as presences through the plants… And I would look at these plants around me and feel that each one was attached to a memory of a person or of a time. I knew precisely where I had got it, how I had planted it, and so on. And so, in a sense, that although there is this great sense of loss in not having those people or animals near me, and yet they do still live on because I have their lilies or I have their cacti... So it’s almost like a sort of photo album that lives for you, and it’s for you alone, because any casual visitor to a garden will, of course, experience it differently. Q: Well, as you see, everything happens in its own time. A: The woman who said that to me is a neighbor of mine. When she said that about the garden, she didn’t really mean it in a philosophical manner. She meant it in the way of predicting failure. And I’ve always been astonished in many things I’ve done, how people predict failure when you’ve begun… And that is the beauty about a garden. A garden grows and it teaches you to fall in rhythm, fall in step, grieve the loss of the plant you’ve been trying to nurture, such as those plants you brought from abroad. But the thing is, it also teaches you the joy and to appreciate and live in the moment and say, I did it. Not single handedly, I did it with the soil, with nature, with sunlight, with water. You live in that ecosystem, you don’t operate in isolation.
