The quirkiest garden book Roy Strong has read in years

Incredulity is rarely a word that crosses my mind when it comes to garden writing. This genre can, of course, be quite straight-forward and descriptive, like Miss Jekyll’s rather boring volumes. It can equally be wildly funny, as when Anne Scott-James and Osbert Lancaster hitch their respective wagons to horticulture and produce a spoof history. But where, oh where did Sam Llewellyn’s exotic aberration spring from? Is it fact or fiction? I don’t think I ever decided which. This is one of those books where you spend the whole time worrying less about what’s happening in the kitchen garden in spring and more on trying to work out what the hell is this place and who on earth is this man with a less-than-house-trained duchess in tow.

The author, he reveals, lives in a house in Herefordshire, in the north part of the county. It is called The Hope. He’s not your Alan Titchmarsh earthy son of the soil type or a member of the silk dress and pearls school of the Rosemary Verey variety. He’s highly educated — not everyone listens to Tacitus on headphones while gardening, for a start. He writes novels in France, has a wife, a daughter who gets married and a son called Will. His connections ramble on through the county upper classes with an aunt a daughter of Tresco who marries into St Michael’s Mount. The house has a library and medieval vaulting. It sounds lovely after a fashion.

And then there is the duchess. I wondered whether she might be a figment of the writer’s imagination, as the county isn’t exactly stuffed with free-roaming duchesses. No such luck. She drinks gin like the proverbial fish and smokes Capstans on the scale of a kipper smokery.