Digging with the Duchess

In 2007 David Wheeler asked if I would write an essay about the Hope for Hortus, Britain’s most beautiful and least illustrated gardening journal, of which he is the editor. The Hope is an ancient house with a garden that is somewhere between gigantic and uncontrollable. I had flu at the time, and was too weak to argue. I therefore wrote an essay based on what I could see from the sickbed, which included scarlet dogwoods and blue kingfishers; then another, then another, until we had discussed about seventy per cent of a decade of the turning year in the garden at the Hope, and quite a lot about gardens and people elsewhere. These essays are the basis of Digging with the Duchess.

It rapidly became clear that gardening on your own is all very well, but it is better with companions. I therefore decided that I would enlist the Duchess. Since the day I found her slumped against the statue known as the Giant’s Keyring she has infiltrated the garden like bindweed in an asparagus bed. Sometimes I try to write understandingly about her horticultural whims and her tussles with life, gin and fags, in the vague hope that some sort of second-hand confession may cleanse her dark soul. Most of the time, though, I speak as I find. And so, Heaven help us, does she.

Sam Llewellyn

'Almost hallucinatory – the quirkiest gardening book I've read for years, offbeat, beguiling, wickedly observant. But Sam Llewellyn won't get a job on Gardeners’ Question Time.'

Sir Roy Strong in the Spectator

'Buy every grown-up you know a copy of Digging with the Duchess.’

Anna Pavord in the Independent

‘To be honest, I didn’t really understand what was going on – who the Duchess is, when this is happening, if it’s even real or not – but I didn’t really care. I read it twice.’

Someone at the American Horticultural Society

Digging Deeper with the Duchess

Digging with the Duchess shifted the balance of gardening books away from muck and magic towards a darkish hilarity, earning international plaudits in the process. Digging Deeper with the Duchess is a new volume of essays, in which the saga continues, packed with horticulture, travel and risk. Read it if you dare.

'It's hard to be funny about gardening, but Sam Llewellyn manages it in Digging Deeper with the Duchess.

The Oldie

'Funny, scabrous, phantasmagoric - not to mention surprisingly useful plants-wise. The perfect gift for a green-fingered loved one.'

The Tatler

'Unashamedly light-hearted and witty....Sam Llewellyn has a duchess staying with him in his house, The Hope, in Herefordshire. To keep her off the gin and fags he takes her either into his large garden or into other people’s, here and abroad, where she makes pungent comments and gets into scrapes. Along the way, information is imparted, some of it horticultural... I can recommend this book for your bedside table.'

Ursula Buchan in the Spectator