FLORID PROSE IN NEED OF A PRUNE
Seed To Dust: A Gardener’s Story Marc Hamer Harvill Secker £14.99 ★★★
Marc Hamer has spent two decades tending the 12-acre garden of 80-year-old Miss Cashmere. He doesn’t do it for money, although he is paid a modest amount to watch over this lush, beautiful patch of Welsh countryside. Mostly he works for love, love of the plants, birds and animals that share this shaded haven. Love, too, for Miss Cashmere, even though Hamer rarely talks to her and has never been invited into the big house. He loves her because he senses the garden means as much to her as it does to him. It is, in an unspoken way, their garden.
Seed To Dust is an intensely lyrical account of a single year spent cutting, burning, planning and planting. We start in the deep midwinter, when everything is still frozen, and move through the seasons with Hamer as he tends the hydrangeas, plants the dahlias and prunes the old apple trees. He watches the wildlife too – the jackdaws pecking at the frozen ground, the peppered moth perfectly disguised against the tree bark, and the carp in the pond to which he tosses crumbs from his packed lunch.
Each small section of the book – some only a few paragraphs long – gives rise to Hamer’s ponderings on the impermanence of the natural world, and the futility of trying to direct its outcomes. He also sketches in his earlier life, as a runaway Northern boy, a tramp (his word) and manual labourer. Quickly the book progresses from an observational gardening journal to a manual for living, with a dollop of Zen Buddhism and Dylan Thomas thrown in for good measure. Seed To Dust sits firmly inside the tradition known as ‘the new Nature writing’, which is actually rather old, having been a publishing staple for at least a decade now. The new nature writing requires a lush poetic style and close observation, in which the reader is asked to see the world, if not in a grain of sand, then at least in a curling autumn leaf. The problem with this approach, at least as practised by Hamer, is that it can dissolve into platitude. Unblushingly he informs us that ‘Death is a once-ina-lifetime event for an individual’ and ‘Perfection is never achieved’. Mostly, though, he likes to talk about himself, telling us: ‘I am simply a potential ready to play: a child, a wind, an empty jug ready to be filled.’ Another time he claims: ‘Whether I like it or not, I am like the hare and the owl, the carp and the buzzard.’ So which is he, a jug or a buzzard? Sometimes, just when you think he’s about to explain, he writes a haiku instead.
Nature writers often over-polish their prose to jolt their readers into feeling the wonder of everyday things – tadpoles, or the sound of the rain on a spring morning. But the point should be to nudge us into new understandings, of how tadpoles grow or where the rain has come from, and then perhaps warn us that it is in danger of destruction by our own stupidity.
Marc Hamer doesn’t do this. Instead he gives the impression of being a writer who has done that dangerous thing, of falling in love with the sound of his own voice.