My name is Frank Hopkinson and I am a grumpy gardener. Despite obtaining a degree in Environmental Studies from the agricultural college of London University - which included elements of ecology, horticulture and plant science - I've found that growing stuff doesn't come that easily. Most gardening books and websites showcase wonderful gardens and immaculate vegetable plots.
This isn't one of them.

 

Grumpy Gardener's World embraces failure like it was a fur-lined overcoat in an arctic storm on Orkney. It is an ongoing testament to the fact that you never stop learning in life. In my case learning what I can't keep alive for any appreciable length of time. Writing a beginner's guide to beekeeping for the National Trust (under the pen-name Andrew Davies) was enjoyable, but because it was a serious work I couldn't really include stories about putting the brood box back on the hive upside down, or losing a queen bee I'd just been sent in the post. Or getting five angry bees up your veil. Now that's not funny, unless you're an observer and have a high tolerance to shrieking. On the other hand, writing The Grumpy Gardener's Handbook was bliss, it finally gave meaning to all the years spent persecuting ground elder, chopping back ivy, digging, hoeing, sowing, weeding, composting and, on rare occasions, harvesting.

 

This blog draws inspiration from the work, while exploring new areas of under-achievevement in my Surbiton garden. Me and the wife have a space roughly the size of Tom and Barbara Good's in The Good Life and like Tom and Barbara, our neighbours have money and employ gardeners, whereas we do our own in a motley collection of garden footwear whilst avoiding the output from a scatalogical fox.*

 

Writing this blog is a kind of therapy. So thank you for reading. It's part of a 412-step programme.

 

 

 

*Like a Match of the Day touch map I'm keen to log each new location on a plan  to see if I can see a pattern forming, but the wife thinks that is some kind of scive to make myself look busy while she weeds the beds.