Where do you live and what kind of garden do you have?
My spouse, Jayne, and I have actually just recently moved from north to south London and we have actually got a small but fantastic garden at the back of the house. Right from the start, I knew it would be important to us, since our four-year-old child, Saylor, likes playing outside. We have enough room for a patio by the back entrance, a synthetic yard in the middle and raised beds on all sides, where we have actually planted some of our favourite things– Japanese maple, jasmine, wisteria, lavender, white roses and plenty of rosemary, thyme and bay.
When did you initially get into gardening?
When we were at our previous house, in Wood Green, north London. It was a big fixer-upper, so everything required doing, including the garden, which had a couple of shrubs but was mainly full of debris. By opportunity, I bumped into an old buddy of mine at a school reunion who just occurred to have trained as a landscape gardener, and he came over to help us design something from scratch. That’s what actually got me began. It was also a brand-new period in my life; Jayne and I got wed and Saylor was born. There was a sense of the garden belonging of that.
Were you in that house long enough to take pleasure in all the work you had put in?
Certainly. At the bottom of the garden was a grapevine, with a stocky trunk in the ground and its branches, all knotted and twisted, clinging to the back fence. We offered it a prune and developed a proper structure for it to hang over, and the following summertime, to our wonder, it came bursting back to life, creating this fantastic arbour to sit under. Not only that, but hanging from every branch were grapes. I couldn’t think it. That was a game-changer for me. I began to see its majesty. We learnt that it was more than 60 years of ages, so we felt it was our task to look after it. It was the most serene location on the planet, my preferred spot to review scripts, write and simply … think.
Did you have a garden as a child?
I grew up in Hammersmith, in a terraced home that had wisteria going up the front and a little garden at the back. There was very little space to grow anything in the ground, so Mum, who enjoys gardening, utilized to fill it with flowerpots. It was my granny’s garden in the Sussex countryside, when I was a little boy, that truly stands out. She was an enthusiastic garden enthusiast and had flowerbeds all over. She likewise had a huge yard where I ‘d bet hours, and when I got tired of that, I ‘d do things like find a large stick and go round thwacking nettles. Beyond the garden was woodland, which to a city kid was the equivalent of total wilderness.
As the great-great-great- grandson of Charles Dickens, did you understand he was passionate about gardening?
Dickens boils down through my mom’s side of the household– her maiden name was Dickens, so I definitely learnt about him, maturing. In fact, after Eton, I studied English at Oxford and did my thesis on the relationship in between Dickens and his illustrators. Let’s just state I invested a lot of time studying his work and life, and he had a gorgeous garden at Gad’s Hill Location, his country house in Kent, which is now a school.