THE SECRET PASSIONS THAT MAKE US HAPPY
Find out what sparks joy for these celebrities
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It was the garden that sold the place to us: a long, meandering plane of grass with huge borders and a simple pond in the middle. I didn’t know it then, of course. After all, I knew less than nothing about gardens. All I knew was that when I stood there, with the sun on my face, listening to birdsong as soft and lovely as a piece of jazz, I felt, for the first time in months, alive. I looked at my husband. He looked back at me. We decided to buy the house.
In hindsight, I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me that I fell hard for gardening. Our garden was, after all, the place of my happier childhood memories: hunting for four-leaf clovers; balancing a ladybird, the colour of mum’s lipstick, on the tip of my index finger; learning to walk in five-inch heels round the pampas grass.
But it was also the place I became closest to my father; the place I saw him transform. Inside the house, he was like a caged animal, irritable and restless, thinking only of work. But outside, bent over a stuttering lawn mower or hovering over a tea rose, his nose pressed to the petals, he was soft, gentle… available. On summer evenings, he would stand by the kitchen window, looking out over his garden, his ‘land’, as he would call it. He
would stand like that, a cigarette in one hand, a glass of whisky in the other, and simply stare until the sky turned black.
‘I KNEW I NEEDED SOMETHING FOR ME’
Gardens exited my life around the time I turned 18 and moved to London from the small Mancunian suburb where I’d grown up. And there, almost overnight, I became an ardent lover of the grand metropolis. I found beauty in the stucco-fronted houses of Notting Hill, excitement in the stinking asphalt of Shoreditch and charm in the sleazy streets of Soho. I forgot what it was like to feel the tickle of grass across my legs or hear a dawn chorus. I didn’t miss trees, didn’t mourn the sight of a daisy-strewn patch of grass and didn’t crave the musk of a rambling rose after a rainstorm. In the city, it is only ever two seasons: hot or cold. And for many years, that was enough for me.
Besides, I had other things on my mind, namely, work. From the minute I got my first job as a writer (on this very magazine) I grafted. Work excited me. It gave me an identity. It was where I felt safest and most in control. I mountaineered my way to the editorship of a national glossy magazine by the age of 33. I won awards, travelled the world and sat in front rows at fashion week shows. Life was good. Except it wasn’t… not really. Work was good; not life. Because the truth was that I didn’t have much of a life.
I discovered this when a life coach friend persuaded me to take a session with her. At the end, she turned to me and said, ‘Work can’t be everything in your life, you know. You need to let go. You need to find something for you.’
I thought about it and it was true.
I was approaching 40 and I had little in my life beyond a job and a husband I loved. But a hobby sounded so infantile, too light, too much like letting go. I tried spin classes, but they felt more like some form of frenzied self-improvement than enjoyment. I thought about painting classes, but knew I could never commit to the time. And then one morning, as I stood by the kitchen window, I looked out at the garden my husband and I had fallen in love with when we had bought our house three years earlier. The pond was overgrown now. Bindweed had caused a monumental massacre in the borders and the lawn was littered with rotten apples and furious weeds. It was a project. It was work. It called to me for help. And I responded.
I bought a spade, some secateurs and a second-hand book called How
To Garden and I got to work. The first year was a disaster; I pulled out hundreds of bulbs I thought were weeds. I cut back trees in the prime
I’d spent my life trying to control everything. In the garden, I had to go with the flow
of their growth. I shopped at the garden centre as though it were Net-a-porter, thinking nothing of practicality, only of how beautiful things appeared. And yet when I was in the garden, my fingers deep in the fudgy soil, I felt alive. I also felt freed from the mental prison of work. There was so much to do, so much to take in that, as I bent and dug and tended to plants, my mind took flight. I would be out in the garden at 6am and return to the house in the evening, muddy kneed, effervescent and blushing like an oversexed teenager. My husband eyed me suspiciously.
I realised I needed some guidance and when I spotted a small advert in the local paper for a gardening class with a woman called Jo Arnell, I went along. After the class, I hung back; would she consider helping me with my garden, I asked. She arrived the following weekend.
And so Jo worked with me. She taught me how to plant a border and how to coax in birds and bees and frogs. She talked about scent and seasons and the bewitching rhythm of the garden. She guided me away from seductive, short-lived grand beauties like peonies and bearded iris (‘they are like glamorous guests who turn up to a party then leave without helping with the washing-up’) and towards quieter, stalwarts, such as cosmos and Japanese anemones, which would reward me with colour and form for months.
But she also taught me the most precious rule of all, which is that I would never be able to control the garden. Instead, I would have to move with it, the way a canoe must move with the current. Badgers would always trample my flower beds, moles always burrow in my lawn. Bindweed would return month after month and some seeds would never sprout. It was a revelation. I’d spent my life trying to control everything. In the garden, I was forced to just go with the flow. It has been hard, I won’t lie, particularly the ‘going with the flow’ part. In the
It is a hobby suited to the alpha worker; for in the garden, there is always more to do
beginning, I would spend days building chicken-wire fortresses to ward off mice. I would overwater, then underwater; try to recreate structure with box balls and pyramidal yews when all my garden wanted was to be blousy and romantic. But once I accepted I couldn’t tame the land I had inherited, I relaxed into it.
I would not say I am a great gardener, but I am a gardener. Its constant need to be tended and tamed provides me with a drive and purpose. In that way, it is a hobby suited to the alpha worker – for in the garden, there is always more to do, new heights to scale, new skills to learn. But gardening has also tamed and tended to me. It has taught me patience. It has made me comfortable with failure. It has forced me to give up on the idea that
I can control the world around me.
Today, I look forward to the
Chelsea Flower Show more than the Paris fashion shows and I prefer to spend my money on Italian Terrace Terracotta rather than Céline shoes. And for my 40th birthday, I did not buy a new handbag or take myself off on an exotic holiday. Instead, I transformed a corner of my garden into a cut-flower patch so that I could have fresh flowers every week of the year. I look at it from my kitchen window, watching the blue tits sweep into the clouds of lilac verbena. I watch it until the sky turns black.
• Farrah Storr’s book The Discomfort Zone (Piatkus) is available now