What prompted your new book? I only ever write when I have a problem, and with this it was a combination of the menopause, which is always fun, and the world as it is at the moment. It’s an anxious age; no one is optimistic. I thought the best thing to do was give up on civilization entirely and start my own – that’s what all the billionaires are doing, building apocalypse bunkers. Then found out I wasn’t a billionaire, so I needed to come up with another solution to feel more hopeful.
What did you learn from writing the book? There were two key things. First, just having that little mind switch from waiting for things to go back to normal. A lot of people my age hope things will go back to how they were in the 1990s. They won’t. And also allowing yourself to think, I can make choices. Being hopeful is a choice, it’s a doing word. If you feel despairing at the end of the day, look back and ask, did I do anything to make myself feel hopeful? Everything in the book is something that’s either low cost or no cost at all; they’re simply little tweaks to make your day.
What have you found makes you hopeful? In the book I talk about visiting Knepp, which is such a joyful place to walk around. What blew my mind is that everything has got better since they started the rewilding project. Every year, they’re reporting more species, more life, more biodiversity. Unfortunately, I don’t own 70,000 acres, but I do have a back garden and I could see some stuff I could do in my garden. If you just put in a pond and have a small area where you let the grass grow, you will immediately bring in insects, which bring in frogs and toads, and birds and bats. Every morning I walk around my garden with my cup of coffee and see what’s come up. It’s the perfect start to the day. You feel in control of your life and that the world is here to delight you. Your garden never asks for a tenner or says, “I feel sad”. It just says: “Here’s something beautiful, enjoy it.”
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What’s your garden like? It’s an average north London back garden. I’ve just put in a waterfall that flows towards the house, and there’s a pond next to the patio by the back door. The vibe is supposed to be a combination of Japanese and Welsh. I love moss and am obsessed with acers. The colour scheme is basically purple and green and white. There’s a huge rose that just flowers all the year with white roses, and Verbena bonariensis everywhere. Last year, I had the greatest joy a middle-aged woman can have, which isn’t suddenly dating Pedro Pascal. I managed to convince my neighbours to sell me a portion of their garden to grow all my fruit and veggies. I’ve since been pathetically asking my co-host on the Outsiding podcast, Adam Frost, what I should do with it. Eventually he gave in and has designed this beautiful system of raised borders with rocks.
HOW TO BE HOPEFUL
by Caitlin Moran
Ebury Publishing, £22
ISBN 978-1529974799
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Who would you most like to show around your garden? My dream podcast guest is Paul McCartney. He’s my favourite human being on Earth, but he’s always asked about music and the Beatles and John Lennon. No one ever talks to him about gardening, or the fact that at the height of the Beatles’ fame, he took on a farm in Scotland and started thatching the roof himself and became self sufficient. I’d love to give him the relief of not having to tell again how he wrote Yesterday, and just talk about gardening.
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- Adam Frost reveals the secret to having a lovely garden
- 'When I'm not in the garden, I pull buses and lift rocks': Martha Swales on her new book
What’s your guilty gardening secret? I’ve started composting and feel I’m a bad compost mother. When the weather was a bit colder my compost was great. It was steaming in the morning, it was dream compost. But as the summer got hotter and drier, it stopped doing that. I’m now fretting over it like I would a child sitting their GCSEs.
What’s your biggest gardening mistake? I used to be the Agent Orange of gardens. I would buy pots and pots of lavender and plant them in clay beneath an apple tree in deep shade, then watch them die agonisingly as I sobbed: “But I wanted them to be there.”
What gardening tool can’t you live without? I’ve recently bought myself a pair of Japanese shears, and they’ve been amazing.
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