“It saves me getting stuck in,” he says. “Well, of course, it’s not ‘no work at all’, it’s more like, ‘as little work as possible, and chilled work at that’.”
He admits the no-work tag is a tad misleading, but the subtitle of his latest gardening book, Getting the Most Out of Your Garden for the Least Amount of Work, sums up his philosophy.
Flowerdew — a long-time contributor to BBC Radio 4’s Gardeners’ Question Time — reckons there are two ways to work in the garden: “Working really hard on serious chores, and a kind of pottering that looks like work but is more about being alive in the garden — weeding where it doesn’t really need it, stuff like that.”
It’s no surprise he favours the second approach. “It’s kind of like meditation, it’s nurturing, and it’s the type of experience we need in the modern world,” he says.
Irish gardeners will be able to tap into Flowerdew’s particular brand of wisdom at Farmleigh next Saturday and Sunday, when he’ll be delivering two talks — one on no-work gardening and another on organics.
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Although Flowerdew has been pivotal in showing gardeners that they can grow their own food with minimal effort, and has been a champion of growing more unusual crops, such as bananas, in temperate European climates, he himself sees his role in gardening as slightly comedic.
He says he loves poking fun at other gardeners for such crimes as slapping decking everywhere (“make your garden a slimy deathtrap”), planting radishes (“everyone grows them, but do you know anyone who eats them?”), and the particularly British fetish of growing peculiarly enormous vegetables (“They don’t taste better the bigger they get, you know”).
Flowerdew also sees no point in growing things because one is expected to, and reckons it’s a classic way to create unnecessary work. “People feel you have to grow vegetables in rows. It’s traditional, but it’s laborious. Why grow rows of things you don’t like? I grow three parsnips a year, because you have to have something for Christmas, and two Brussels sprouts plants — one for me and one for my father.”
But he wasn’t always such a loafer.
“Years ago, I was on some kind of mission to prove that my garden could grow anything organic I wished, and I wanted it to be neat and tidy. I achieved it, but I’m not sure it was worth all that effort to make a point. We have this attachment to tidy gardens, but what’s wrong with a looser approach? Not a wilderness, but a wilder garden. It’s beautiful. And it’s much less work.”
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Surprisingly for an organic enthusiast, Flowerdew is sceptical of the present upsurge of interest in growing vegetables. Vegetables mean commitment, and aren’t often realistic about our limitations. “People think, ‘Oh, I want to get healthier, I must grow some vegetables’. But they don’t eat vegetables now. Why do they think they will just because they grow them themselves?” For most of us, reckons Flowerdew, a fruit cage is a better no-work option than a vegetable plot. The initial work is about the same — preparing, planting, etc — but over time, vegetables need far more attention, care and planning: fruit trees are only planted once.
“I love fruit. It’s easier to grow and better for nature than vegetables. And if you grow undercover, you can grow a range. A good melon is a wonderful achievement. It tastes completely different from a supermarket one, which is under-ripe when it’s picked. With grass clippings blended into the earth, you can generate enough heat to grow melons under plastic.
“The other benefit to growing fruit over vegetables is a lack of waste. If you don’t use the berries, some other creature will,” he says.
Fruit trees are particularly powerful in attracting beautiful creatures into your garden: butterflies, bees and birds. For Flowerdew, this in itself is good enough reason to grow them — a garden’s value is more about the experiences it gives you than the impression it creates. “You get to watch some little creature at its life, and whether you believe in God or nature, that’s better than watching television,” he says.
What he wants to emphasise is that we should put effort into the crops that mean something to us, and cut back on the tasks that don’t. “I love strawberries so I grow 24 varieties, and I grow them indoors, outdoors, under plastic, in old car tyres, whatever. You have favourites, and give them better treatment than everything else: I call it ‘gourmet gardening’. Were he to live in Ireland, damper by far than his Norfolk base, he’d grow lots more asparagus and globe artichokes. “Tayberries, too. They love the damp.”
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Flowerdew is puzzled with other gardeners’ dogged stupidity. He says: “They make strange choices, like holding onto a postage stamp of a lawn, which can be demanding to maintain and doesn’t give you much that’s useful, and then they use up all their storage space with a mower, and don’t even notice how mad that is.”