A confidence boosting public speaking course has pushed me to be enormously brave. I have taken a number of bookings for talks in 2020. In preparation for this I have sat down to look through my photographic archive. That makes it sound awfully grand – it is a hard drive full to bursting with photographs documenting the last fifteen years of my gardening career. I have a lot of pre-digital photographs but I will not make my life any harder at this stage by trawling through these.

It has been an interesting exercise. The large Cotswold garden that I have tended for the last ten years has changed hugely. Mostly for the better but sometimes for the worse. It has raised some interesting and frustrating questions: Where did the Actaea go? How is it that I could grow beautiful Delphiniums in one particular border but now I struggle to get them past the very-tasty-to-molluscs stage. Why am I no longer allowed to grow brassicas? They looked amazing! Should I sneak some in?!

The garden needs a boost. The garden needs more Actaea’s and Delphiniums. Looking back has focused my preparation for 2020 – for my new venture into public speaking and in my gardens.