Dame Mary Berry: Having a garden has brought me great solace

Dame Mary Berry may be famed for her great cooking skills, foolproof recipes and mouthwatering bakes, but her passion for gardening comes a close second.

While she claims to be no expert and over the years has taken advice from top plantsmen and women including Alan Titchmarsh, Jekka McVicar, Bunny Guinness and Sarah Raven, she was also president of the National Garden Scheme for a decade and is an RHS ambassador.

She’s a huge fan of BBC Gardeners’ World but she doesn’t watch The Great British Bake Off, she confesses.

“I don’t think it’s fair on my husband. We’re testing recipes all the time, thinking what’s going in the next book, talking recipes. It’s not fair on my husband in the evening to turn on a cooking programme, because he’s seen quite enough of it.”

She has now written My Gardening Life, jottings on her life and memories and what gardening means to her, interwoven with advice from the experts she has learned from.

It also details her favourite plants and offers seasonal advice based on her own experience, from her first tiny garden in London to her huge 3.5 acre plot at Watercroft in Buckinghamshire and her current one-acre garden in Henley-on-Thames, Oxon, which was started six years ago from scratch.

“Over the years, the garden has been a great solace and a place I love to be. Whatever life may bring, being out in the garden usually makes me feel a little bit better about it,” she writes.

Having a garden has helped her through difficult times, she agrees. She has a bed of sweet williams (Dianthus barbatus), dedicated to her late son, William, who died in a car accident aged 19 in 1989.

She has said she counts herself as “very fortunate” to have two other children, five grandchildren and her husband, Paul Hunnings.

“When we lost William, we were very much in the garden, planning, planting, and lovely friends gave us plants, which I brought with me in memory, and I still look at them and think of the happy times we had with him.”

She also brought other plants people had given her including a white Christmas rose (Helleborus niger).

“People gave us hellebores and I’ve made a hellebore bed and added to it. Just when you’re going by, you remember. We’ve nothing but wonderful memories of William and it’s nice to be reminded of him.”

She also took primroses that originally came from her mother’s garden in Bath.

The garden has a way of offsetting tension, she agrees. Famed for not having arguments with her husband, Berry tends to go into the garden and the greenhouse to cool off if she’s miffed.

“If something’s irritating me – for instance if I say I’ve got something lovely for supper and then my other half says, ‘Actually, I’m not very hungry because I had two pieces of cake at tea,’ am I going to say something? No, I’m going in the garden.

“And by the time suppertime comes he’ll enjoy whatever I’ve cooked. It’s not worth having an argument.”

She has a gardener, Kevin Pryce, who has been with her for 32 years and does the lion’s share. At 90, Berry doesn’t do as much as she used to in the garden.

Here, she offers some insights into her gardening world.

How long do you spend in the garden these days?

“I have to admit I’m a fair-weather gardener. I dress for it very warmly in waterproof clothes, but I prefer to garden in fair weather.

“I’m old and I have help in the garden. Kevin comes on a Thursday at 7.30am and I can’t wait because I have a list in my hand which he will already have thought of, all those things to do. He’s taught me a lot.”

Who is your biggest gardening influence?

“The influence comes through taking note when I go to a friend’s garden and I’ll ask to have a look around it.

“When I was president of the National Garden Scheme I went to a lot of gardens and there’s always a little tip you can learn when you go.

“I also have Alan Titchmarsh’s The Gardener’s Almanac by my bed, which tells me what I’m supposed to be doing at particular times. And I learn by mistakes.”
She also attends RHS Chelsea Flower Show annually, where she picks up ideas.

Do you watch gardening programmes?

“I’ve been fortunate to have been on the programme and have seen that his dogs just follow their master, which is exactly what our dogs do.”

What are your favourite plants?

“My top three would be roses – I’ve got a long bed of ‘Chandos Beauty’ which I pick. I love lily of the valley, although I haven’t got enough of them yet, but they are getting established. And among the most useful plants is the tall alstroemeria. I have them in white and pale colours and they last wonderfully in water.”

How do you feel about rewilding?

“I’m not very happy about rewilding. I love a wild section of the garden but I’m not too keen on having weeds. If you allow them they just take over, and when we came here there was quite a lot of bindweed coming under a wall.

“We put black polythene over it for two years. We are now without perennial weeds but have plenty of others we control. I just get out a hoe.”

What edibles do you grow?

“I like to grow lettuces because they are easy, and banana shallots which are expensive in the shops. We’re very successful with carrots because we have raised beds and they don’t get attacked by carrot fly.

“And I’ve always got herbs – I have one lot in five pots outside the back door and some in the raised beds as well because it’s easy to pick them.”

My Gardening Life by Mary Berry is published in hardback by DK, priced £25. Photographs by Britt Willoughby. Available now