It’s just as well I read Grasping the Nettle holed up in my study as I found myself frequently laughing out loud. Tamsin Westhorpe’s look back at her career in horticulture is as funny as it is inspiring.
From a few false starts – work experience as a beautician, a short stint learning secretarial skills, art college – she eventually found her way to horticulture although a hatred of academia led her to choose the shortest college course, Interior Landscaping.
(I was given a copy in return for a fair review.)
Looking after houseplants in offices, hotels and shopping centres was, we’re told, a little like being an air hostess with a uniform and trolley, doing a mundane job that sometimes required you to “step up and save a life at a moment’s notice” – in this case a plant that more often than not was being killed by coffee dregs. However, it did teach her how to water properly – a vital skill for any gardener.
In a career as varied as any well planted garden, Tamsin has worked as a parks gardener – litter picking was her first task – been a horticultural lecturer, worked on gardening magazines and run a gardening shop – “Wimbledon Week was monumentally silent . . . I had no idea how popular tennis was until I opened a shop.”
Today, she tends a garden that opens to the public – a dream she had shared with uncomprehending friends 25 years earlier. Stockton Bury was created by her uncle and his partner and there’s a sense that it’s the family history that she enjoys as much as the gardening.
Even so, it’s not a job without its difficulties: trying to give visitors time while still getting through gardening tasks; the impossibility of lunch breaks during the open season; an almost religious following of weather forecasts.
As a fellow garden writer, if not professional gardener, much of her book resonated. I too work to a different calendar thanks to long lead-in times for magazines, and travel around to remote village halls to give talks, praying the projector and laptop will work, and hoping not too many in the audience will fall asleep. Like Tamsin, I wear my sons’ cast-offs to garden, being reluctant to throw away clothes that still have life left in them.
What makes this book so entertaining is the self-deprecating tone that runs through the chapters. It details the failures as much as the successes from the impulse purchase of the fish-scented Delilah, and deadheading a finger in the middle of a roundabout to attempting to commute through Cheltenham on a Thomas the Tank Engine scooter.
Ultimately, the lesson is to “grasp the nettle” and take any opportunity offered, especially if it involves plants: “There is happiness and adventure to be found in a garden.”
Grasping the Nettle by Tamsin Westhorpe is published by Orphans Publishing with an RRP of £14.99. You can buy it here for £12.99. (If you buy through this link, I receive a small commission. The price you pay is not affected.)
Enjoyed this? You can read more of my gardening and garden-related book reviews here including Tamsin’s first book, Diary of a Modern Country Gardener.
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