My overgrown garden feels like Apocalypse Now

YOU always hear about gardens being places of sanctuary.

Places of peaceful retreat, where you can tweak your petunias, snip at your hydrangeas, coo over your camellias. The garden is about slowness, introspection, a waking meditation as you kneel, communing with the earth, coaxing nature to life with your magical green fingers.

At least that’s the theory. If, however, you have not had the time — or, let’s be honest, the remotest inclination — to kneel in a flower bed patting and trowelling and weeding and watering, chances are that nature will have gone self-employed. You know the bit in Sleeping Beauty when the castle is hidden behind a hundred-year-old hedge of savage brambles that repels all comers? That’s like my house.