The Garden In The Clouds

Product Description

For anyone who's wanted to live the dream but never had the nerve to try. It was a derelict smallholding so high up in the Black Mountains of Wales it was routinely lost in cloud. But to Antony Woodward, Tair-Ffynnon was the most beautiful place in the world. Equally ill-at-ease in town & country after too long in London's ad-l&, Woodward bought Tair-Ffynnon because he yearned to reconnect with the countryside he never felt part of as a child. But what excuse could he invent to move there permanently? The solution, he decided, was a garden. In just a year he'd create a garden so special it would be selected for the prestigious Yellow Book -- the famous National Gardens Scheme guide to gardens open to the public for charity. It's an unlikely ambition to entertain in this most unlikely of settings, & one that soon sees Woodward driven by odder & odder compulsions -- from hauling a 20-tonne railway carriage up the mountain to making hay with hopelessly antiquated machinery. The path to Woodward's elusive sense of belonging turns out to be a rocky & winding one, taking in childhood haunts, children's books & Proustian nostalgia trips. As the family battles gales, mud & Welsh mountain sheep of marble-eyed cunning, not to mention the notoriously fastidious NGS County Organiser, it remains deeply uncertain whether the ' Not Garden' & the 'infinity vegetable patch' (that grows only stones) will ever make the grade! Warm, thought-provoking & brilliantly funny, this is a memoir of a hopeless romantic with a grandly ludicrous ambition -- an ambition to which anyone who's ever dropped into a garden centre, or opened a packet of seeds, has already succumbed.