Mary and I have written a book which, like the proverbial curate’s egg, is good in parts. The part I like best is the blurb on the jacket written by a third party, possibly a Polish intern at publishing HQ: ‘Giles is a countryman who relishes solitude. His wife Mary thrives in company and enjoys frequent escapes to London.’ But, while the cat’s away, the mice will play at Citizen Science. As the slow agricultural years roll by, they present splendid opportunities for the meditative observation of nature on my one-acre estate, in the tradition of Francis Kilvert and Gilbert White and, more recently, of the pony-tailed Gardeners’ Question Time green guru, Bob Flowerdew. ‘I regard my garden as my laboratory,’ says Flowerdew. ‘I water everything and harvest what’s ready. Then I walk around monitoring progress. ‘I have literally hundreds of ongoing experiments. It’s an observation of nature from which...
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