If the health-and-safety brigade knew about me, I would be banned from using garden implements. On the day that Apollo 16 took off in 1972, I was in Casualty having been impaled by a fork that went straight through my thigh. Two years later, I drove our mini tractor over the ha-ha (not my father's reaction at the time); by the age of 18, I had cut off an inch of one of my fingers in an electric hedge cutter.
Last week, when cutting the grass and once again reunited with a mini tractor, I hit a flint that smashed straight through the rear window of our Volvo. Each disaster could have been avoided, but I become a bit of a day-dreamer when the sun is out and there are birds and butterflies to admire.
Gardening, in my case, needs my full concentration. It's the closest I have got to warfare. I'm a liability, although, oddly, I managed to avoid a single breakage in 30 years of hunting, eventing and point-to-pointing, which among serious horsey types is regarded as more than slightly suspicious. I hung up my boots when my luck was in. The following year, I broke my thumb fishing. MH
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‘‘In the silence, it is the most perfect blue I have ever seen. If my goggles weren’t already overflowing with water I might even weep’: Learning to freedive on the sparkling French Riviera with a five-time World ChampionFive-time freediving World Champion Arthur Guérin-Boëri calls the serene waters of Cap-Ferrat his office. Now, one storied hotel is offering guests a chance to take a deep breath and jump into the deep unknown with him.
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The Hollywood garden designers who turned their hand to a magical corner of SomersetCaisson House's fifteen abandoned locks were part of the draw for Amanda and Phil Honey, who have created this astonishing garden in the grounds of the former headquarters of the Somersetshire Coal Canal Company just outside Bath. Caroline Donald discovers more; photography by Jason Ingram.
