Yes, of course this book about "a gardener's life" is also about the garden and about the plants and animals that live in gardens.

But also about completely different things, about getting older, about the fact that one sometimes has to reorient oneself in life, and about how, in the author's opinion, one lives well and contentedly.

In this respect one can learn a lot from Marc Hamer.

"Of Blooming and Decaying" is always particularly interesting when he talks about his own life and the detours that led him as a gardener to Mrs. Cashmere's large estate.

Because he did not lead a gardener's life from the beginning.

Andrea Diener

Correspondent in the Main-Taunus district

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It was not foreseeable when he was born in a mining town in the north of England and became interested in art and poetry.

The men were “trained to make war, ready to fight a foreign power if need be, and when there was no need we had football or rugby and heavy manual labor to keep us fit and ready until we were worn out and replaced by younger versions of ourselves."

These men worked in the pits or in the steel works, the women in the cotton mills or at the stinking vats of the bleaching works.

They thought young Marc was gay.

His mother died early from her destroyed lungs, the father was not comfortable with the boy with a sense of beauty, and so he kicked him out when he was just sixteen years old.

Hamer made a living as a tramp and mole hunter, worked on the railway, later studied art, read poetry, taught creative writing in prisons, married the writer Kate Hamer, known as Peggy, and started a family in Cardiff, Wales.

They live there to this day.

Peggy writes, Marc gardens and posts black and white photos on Instagram, which he takes with an old Rolleiflex.

It's a slow, frugal life.

And at the same time a counter-proposal to modern slow-life mindfulness trends, as alcohol, occasional silliness and a critical mind are still allowed.

"A garden always belongs to the viewer," writes Hamer, and in this sense Mrs. Cashmere's garden belongs to him, at least in part.

Especially since he has been managing and designing it for many years.

Mrs. Cashmere is an elderly widow with settled habits.

The exchange of words with her gardener mostly remains professional, she rarely allows herself a more personal address.

When Hamer once encouraged her to walk barefoot across the dewy meadow and carried her shoes behind her, that was the height of exuberance by her standards.

And then you feel sorry for her in her upper-class habit, which she doesn't take off even when nobody is looking.

She just can't help it.

And thus joins the inhabitants of the garden, the snails, the dahlias, the seagulls that pluck the grass,

Only the gardener can do otherwise.

Hamer is the sort who follows their instincts and doesn't think much of instruction books.

He does what he thinks is right, sowing seedlings and pruning the roses with the utmost timidity so that they grow more luxuriantly.

And in the end he makes a radical decision.

"I'm sorry, my heart's not in it anymore," he writes on a page of his notebook, rips it out, wraps it around the key, and drops it in Mrs. Cashmere's mailbox.

Once again he has to reorient himself. It takes a little courage, but what should frighten someone who roamed the country roads in his youth?

In any case, he will not spend the rest of his life completely without a garden.

He's just creating a new one - one that's a little more his than the one before.

Marc Hamer: "Of flowering and decay".

A gardener's life.

Translated from the English by Brigitte Heinrich.

Insel Verlag, Berlin 2022. 415 pages, illustrations, hardcover, €24.