The worst thing about being an actress? Having to leave my garden...
Caroline Quentin says gardening leaves her giddy with happiness. Now she’s brought a new book of green-fingered advice to life with her own joyful watercolours
BOOK OF THE WEEK DRAWN TO THE GARDEN by Caroline Quentin (Frances Lincoln £20, 192pp)
THE actress Caroline Quentin has been gardening most of her life, starting off with a tiny balcony before tackling large country gardens, and it’s something that makes her ‘giddy with happiness’.
Whereas the world of showbusiness is a glamorous yet fickle companion, gardening is a ‘ calmer, kinder, more constant and reliable friend’.
Best known for her roles in Men Behaving Badly, Jonathan Creek and Blue Murder, as well as her very respectable showing on the 2020 series of Strictly Come Dancing, Quentin sees gardening as the perfect antidote to her acting career.
‘I garden when I’m happy and when I’m sad,’ she writes.
‘When I’m feeling good about life, gardening is a simple pleasure: planning, planting, harvesting and cooking. When my mood is low, it’s a meditative and restorative pastime.’
Increasingly, the excitement and anticipation she feels on being offered a role is tinged with a sense of dread at the prospect of leaving her garden, particularly during the summer months, when it is at its most beautiful.
Drawn To The Garden is a cheerful beginner’s guide to gardening, full of practical tips and encouraging exhortations.
‘ let’s be proud of tiny steps forward and minuscule successes!’ she cries at one point. Yet there’s also a thread of melancholy running through it. Quentin’s mother suffered from bipolar disorder and took several overdoses.
At times, the young Caroline would wake to find that overnight her mother had disappeared:
‘ The psychiatrist had decided to take her back to the “loony bin” as she always referred to it.’ As an adult, Quentin came to realise ‘mental health and nature are inextricably linked’, and that nurturing plants, watching the birds in her garden and eating food she had grown herself were all essential to keep her on an even keel.
‘Over the years, I have tried all of the usual numbing agents to stop the sometimes overwhelming sadness/happiness thing,’ she says.
‘They don’t work for me. The natural world is my go-to, the hand that I hold when I need comfort, my stability in an unstable world.’ She rightly points out that gardening is as much about disappointments as it is about triumphs: like life in general, tending a garden is made up of ‘unplanned successes and baffling and frustrating failures’.
While she is plagued by an excess of courgettes, for instance — ‘some years it’s virtually impossible to keep up with harvesting, cooking or preserving them’ — she is furious that most of her peas are eaten by mice, despite the presence of her five cats, who should be keeping the mice in check. ‘Where the hell are all these mice coming from?’ she wails. If you’re a novice gardener and impatient to get going, she recommends growing things that will germinate quickly, such as radishes, lettuce, spinach, marigolds, nasturtiums and cress.
She is also evangelical about herbs, not only for their culinary uses, but for their visual impact in a flower border or kitchen garden.
Quentin is especially enthusiastic about the pleasures of growing plants from seed: ‘Every seed is a miracle . . . they are all just a surprise waiting to happen.’ Her favourite is fennel, because of the way it swiftly changes from a tiny seed into a sturdy bulb, ‘a transformation better than RuPaul in panto at the Palladium’.
Although she doesn’t give much insight into her acting career — maybe she’s saving that for her memoirs — Quentin still manages to spread some theatrical fairy dust over her garden, reminiscing about the ‘showbiz border’ she planted in one of her gardens, where all the plants were named after stars such as Cliff Richard, Darcey Bussell and Barbara Windsor. Of the sweet peas Monty Don and Alan Titchmarsh, she says roguishly: ‘Just like their namesakes, both were easy on the eye and smelled divine.’
Quentin writes that she is fortunate her ‘long and lucky career in television and theatre’ made it possible for her to acquire a piece of land deep in the heart of rural Devon, with plenty of space to grow flowers and vegetables. She jokes that, whereas other women might have yearned for diamonds, all she dreamed of was seeing the sun sparkling off the panes of her greenhouse. ‘It’s all the bling I need.’
When she and her husband, Sam, bought their ‘derelict smallholding’ 20 years ago, one of their priorities was to encourage wildlife, and she is particularly proud of their pond, ‘without doubt the most thrilling gardening adventure of my life . . . the addition of water to any landscape or garden, no matter how big or small, is a catalyst for change on so many levels’.
AS WELL as being a place where visiting wildlife can drink, lay their eggs or spawn, the pond now teems with frogs, toads, newts, dragonflies and all sorts of other hovering, floating and swimming creatures.
She has a great fondness for the newts and the way they glide across the water like miniature oil slicks.
‘Having newts in your garden is like having a crack squad of ninjas ready to ambush some of your dreaded enemies,’ she writes gleefully.
‘A newt’s sticky tongue will reel in slugs and snails for you.’
She also loves the bats — ‘ shy, rare, silent and intensely private creatures’ — that flit around the garden at dusk, though if one flies into the bedroom she is terrified, hiding under the duvet and ‘ screaming like a virgin in a Hammer House Of Horror film’ until her husband can remove the creature.
Drawn To The Garden is full of sound and encouraging advice for new gardeners and is much enlivened by her impressively accomplished illustrations.
At times, Quentin’s writing style veers perilously close to tweeness — and I didn’t really need to know she likes to garden in the nude or to see an illustration of her naked back view — but she’s very good at conveying the uncomplicated joy she gets from her garden.
And, like all the best gardening books, reading it makes you itch to get out in the garden yourself and start growing things.
‘We gardeners are optimists,’ she declares. ‘To sow a seed is an act of hope and to plant a tree is to believe in the future.
‘Even in the short, cold days of winter, gardeners know that the warmth of spring is just around the corner.’