"From a small boy I had wanted only to be a and to work on the land. A hurdle-maker's life seemed to me to be ideal, your materials with hand tools in the woods and then making hurdles with hypnotic skill. As a student I had seriously considered becoming a thatcher. In an ideal world I would farm as well, but I had worked on farms and seen that only those with money had any chance of owning their own land and for me, possession was a large part of the draw. The only writing that I considered was fiction. It never crossed my mind to write about gardening, even though by then I had written — and destroyed — a couple of excruciatingly bad novels, and was facing the sneaking suspicion that I might not be any good at it."