Cultivating the human spirit against the odds

The Garden in the Clouds: Confessions of a Hopeless Romantic

It doesn’t sound like a compelling plot but the book is full of surprises. The author is a wonderful writer who can describe country life with the passion of a Thoreau and the humour of a Bill Bryson. In a former existence, he was a successful advertising copy writer. This is probably the most exacting of literary disciplines — though it seldom gets credit for it. To write a 30-second commercial for television or radio requires the same precision and economy with words as writing a 17th-century sonnet did. Woodward uses these skills to make the reader, in turn, happy, sad and enthralled.

The second surprise is that there’s little about gardening in the book. He does write movingly about gardens he knew in his childhood and about other people’s gardens.

But by the last chapter, after he has triumphantly and successfully opened his property to the paying public, he still doesn’t have a garden of his own. This is largely because all his vegetables, fruit and trees have been eaten by wily Welsh mountain sheep.

The sub-title of the book is ‘Confessions of a Hopeless Romantic’. This would be more accurate if it read ‘Confessions of an English Eccentric’. His efforts to bring a huge and ancient railway carriage up the narrow mountain lanes to the property, so that he could convert it into his writing room, are truly mad and result in considerable damage to the surrounding landscape, which happens to be in the Brecon Beacons National Park.

This does not endear him to the park authorities. But the great thing is that he recognises his own eccentricity and treats it with a self-deprecating sort of British humour, which is quite charming.

Above all else, Antony Woodward is a great story teller. Many of the stories are funny but some of them are rather sad. His account of his mother’s riding accident, which left her confined to a wheelchair for most of her life, is very moving. His account of his attempt to overcome his terror of bees and become an apiarist is crowned by winning first prize at a local agricultural show for the best pound of honey — a great triumph, even if there was only one other contestant. And his stories of the battles with the ‘dragons’ who control the world of gardens licensed to open to the public becomes quite gripping.

Quite a lot of books have been written by burnt-out people who have abandoned the urban rat race. So many, in fact, that the genre has even been given a name — ‘flit-lit’.

As someone who did his own flit many years ago, I am interested in the genre. But most of the books I find disappointing. This one is the exception. I thoroughly recommend it. If you have no interest in gardening, don’t be put off by the title.

This book has more to do with the cultivation of the human spirit than the cultivation of the soil.