Author:Mark Wallington
Mark Wallington has a dream. He is going to change the face of British comedy.
Unfortunately for the residents of north London, he's going to finance this dream by becoming a gardener.
The result is The Day Job, an account of a year spent working in other people's gardens: people like Mrs Fleming who is convinced there is buried treasure in the bottom bed; Mr Walters who is trying to create a fascist state policed by gnomes in his well-guarded plot in Gospel Oak; Mrs Glover who is probably the most attractive woman living in Britain; and poor Mr Nugent, who likes to save his urine in jam jars and pour it over his compost.
Over four seasons Wallington crosses Hampstead Heath from job to job. He survives brushes with the evil contract gardeners who keep trying to knock him off his bicycle. He strives to impress literary agent Herman Gapp who might represent him - depending on what sort of job he does on Gapp's Alpine Terrace. He even finds time to fall for a housecleaner-cum-actor named Helen, as he becomes part of a strange band of artistes, each with a day job of their own, all waiting for that first break.
This is the story of long nights spent in the back room of a pub trying to write unsolicited scripts, and of much longer days spent trying to understand the British and their strange obsession with gardening.
An affectionate account of a year he spent fleecing the residents of north London as a jobbing gardener... Likeable and generous
—— GuardianWould be hard to beat
—— The HeraldGives brilliant hints and advice to the beginner and the experienced gardener alike... As stunning as you would expect from a BBC publication
—— Good Book GuideNo cheesy makeovers, no outrageous fantasy gardens, this is the real garden. What to do, when to do it, how to do it, all clearly explained and lavishly photographed... Any gardener will be digging into this one all year round
—— South Wales Evening PostLively finds memories of her own gardens scrambling like roses through insights into the history of gardening and the artists - including Woolf, Monet and PG Wodehouse - who have been inspired by their gardens
—— Daily MailDelightful
—— LadyElegant, entertaining and inspirational
—— Woman & HomeThe perfect book for dedicated garden lovers
—— S MagazineA blossoming triumph
—— Waterstones Newsletter[An] engaging history... All sorts of people found solace in creating small regions of abundance and fertility, a counter to the annihilating wastefulness of war.
—— Olivia Laing , Observer[A Green And Pleasant Land is] this year's most stimulating work of Horticultural History...an exhaustively researched, possibly definitive, and occasionally myth-dispelling account of the role of gardeners, amateur and professional, in World War II.
—— Morning StarFascinating . . . [Buchan’s] narrative, together with a collection of well-researched first-hand accounts, takes us on a journey that starts with 1930s Britain (where gardens and allotments had little significance in everyday life), through the war years that encouraged every citizen to grow their own and provide for their families. It ends with what happened in the desperate post-war years that saw potatoes and bread being rationed. An absorbing read.
—— English GardenBuchan has done a lot of work to show how gardening became a war time survival tool . . . Powerful
—— IndependentIn this unpretentious account of Britain's wartime gardeners, Ursula Buchan gently celebrates the dogged determination of characters such as... middle-class ladies who taught the rudiments of gardening in draughty village halls; park superintendents and professional gardeners employed by country house estates, who transformed rose gardens into fields of maize and herbaceous borders into cabbage patches; ...horticulturalists who improved compost and researched the most productive vegetable strains; hard-pressed nurserymen who gave up selling more profitable ornamental plants for vegetables; and professional gardeners, who watched the young men they had trained go off to war.
—— The Times Literary Supplement
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