WELLBEING ‘Gardening is such a tonic and a joy’

*** BEING ACTIVE DURING AND AFTER TREATMENT CAN:

Boudicca Fox-leonard

Early this morning, when the roads of the capital were dark and empty, Naomi Miller got into her car and drove from her home in north London to New Covent Garden flower market. She bought hellebores, heather and ferns, while chatting to the traders who know her face well; no longer do they make cracks about whether she’s on her way home from the night before. It’s a routine that leaves her energised and happy. It’s also integral to her job as a much in-demand garden designer, maintaining a roster of large London gardens for highprofile clients.

Three years ago she was rising at 3am for a very different reason. Trapped in the middle of six months of punishing chemotherapy and unable to sleep, Miller would get up and drive to a specialist gym on Harley Street for people with cancer.

“Three times a week I would take myself there and get on the running machine. At the start I was absolutely sobbing, really sobbing,” recalls the 54-year-old.

We are in her living room, looking out on the garden jam-packed with annabels and hydrangeas, which for the last 15 years she has cultivated in a signature style of tamed wildness.

“I don’t like an over-pruned garden,” she says. “I love countryside planting, a cottage garden feel.”

A passionate gardener her whole life – a hobby nurtured in Hertford- shire where as a girl she grew her own vegetables in a greenhouse (“I would recommend anyone with kids to get one”) – her garden has long been her sanctuary, a place where she can lose herself in creativity.

“Landscaping is the slowest of the performing arts,” says Miller, who with her flair for fashion, says gardening is the last thing people expect her to love. But she loves to kneel down and get her hands dirty. “I’ve always found it very relaxing, a real stress-buster and amazing for mental health.”

But in the immediate days after her diagnosis of breast cancer in August 2015, Miller was unable to find any joy and purpose in her garden. And as September arrived and she embarked on eight rounds of chemotherapy, she struggled to even look out at it. “I love the seasons but as I saw the leaves falling I kept thinking, ‘ this could be my last autumn.’”

While it’s rare to find someone whose life hasn’t been touched by breast cancer, be it through a friend or family member, Miller discovered that nothing prepares you for the shock of your own diagnosis.

Having previously suffered cysts, she admits to having danced into the doctor’s room not expecting that lump she’d found in her left breast to actually be malign.

“I hadn’t been feeling great, but I didn’t think it would be breast cancer,” she says, still shocked at her naivety.

But as mammograms, pet scans and bone scans followed, the seriousness of her situation dawned. Miller was told

‘I went into cancer life overnight. My hair was coming out, my eyelashes’

she needed a lumpectomy. While there was no sign the cancer had spread to her lymph nodes, a subsequent biopsy showed it was a particularly aggressive tumour. Chemotherapy and radiotherapy were needed.

“Life goes from making dinner for family and friends to being in cancer mode overnight,” she says. “My hair was coming out, my eyelashes. It was pretty dehumanising.”

Plunged into the painful and confusing world of cancer treatment, Miller, a widow, tried to stay strong for her children, Jacob, 26, and Allie, 24. “It’s an awful thing but when you’re at our weakest you have to be at your strongest,” she says.

Yet from those dark days, the seeds of a new life sprouted. It was during Miller’s chemotherapy that she was approached to work with her first

Sunday 14 October 2018