Given his status as a social media influencer and the seemingly endless books on gardening for good mental health, it would be easy to dismiss Jonny Hincks as yet another celebrity jumping on a tired bandwagon. Yet, that would do his book, Garden Yourself Happy, a great disservice.
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Unlike others, he is not someone who has joined the gardening gang as it’s become fashionable and, despite his online status, he’s not merely sharing Instagram worthy stories and pictures but rather the unedited reality of what it’s like to tend a patch of earth.
His love affair with plants started from a young age – “long before I even knew what gardening really was” – thanks to family holidays to Holland and a Dutch grandmother who needed help with her own garden.
Later, along with gym sessions, it became a way of coping first with his mother’s long illness and then her death when he was just 18: “The gym gave me strength. The garden gave me stillness.” Today, the two interests also help him deal with the stresses of his day job as a firefighter.
The first part of Garden Yourself Happy is devoted to his growth as a gardener and his gardening philosophy. That can be simply summed up as no one knows everything, plants do die, there’s no such thing as a perfect garden, even if social media can make it seem that there is, and, above all, gardening should be fun. To emphasise that last point, the book is peppered with his humorous asides, while we learn about his mistakes from fried lupins to drowned tomatoes.
The rest of Garden Yourself Happy covers his advice on everything from encouraging children to love gardening to getting the perfect lawn – he is a self-confessed lawn nerd, an obsession borne out of grief when it was a job given to him while his mother was ill.
“When my mum was poorly, mowing the lawn became my escape,” he tells us and he still uses it as a way to de-stress: “The lawn isn’t just a patch of grass, it’s therapy with stripes.”
Tasks are divided into seasons, which then have sections on particular jobs. Particularly useful are the 10-minute, 20-minute and 30-minute jobs, ideal for fitting gardening into a busy life.
There’s a run through on pruning – when to do it and what to prune – how to best control weeds, and a breakdown on why you should mulch and what to use.
Designed as a book to either read cover to cover, or to dip into for seasonal inspiration, Jonny says he hopes people will “flip through, scribble notes, dog-ear pages”.
“I wanted this book to feel like we’re chatting in your garden over a brew.” In that, he’s succeeded.
Garden Yourself Happy by Jonny Hincks, illustrations by James Yates, is published by Ebury Press with an RRP of £16.99. #Ad You can buy it here for £8.73. (If you buy via this link, I receive a small commission. The price you pay is not affected.) Alternatively, you may wish to buy from an independent bookseller here. All prices correct at time of publication of this post.
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