I have been a keen gardener since childhood and living in the countryside was brought up ‘in nature’, learning everything from how to build a dry-stone wall to the lives and habits of water voles and crayfish. I even appeared on an edition of the BBC’s ‘Animal Magic’ with Johnny Morris on that subject in about 1969. So setting out to write a blog on ‘veg growing, composting, organic gardening, allotments, garden writing with a radical twist ….with the occasional bit of magic thrown in’ as Lord Muck, wasn’t quite as daunting as keeping the rapidly growing walnut tree on my allotment under control. It all started in 2013 when I received an invitation to a Garden Party at Buckingham Palace, in my role as Chair of Garden Organic, President the then Prince Charles. ‘You will have to go as Lord Muck’ my partner jokingly remarked. Yes, and she came along as Lady Muck. And the idea for a blog with that name was born.
‘Nature writing’ is the publishing industry’s ‘sweet spot’ at the moment. Such is its popularity that one well known writer in the genre said to me recently ‘People seem to think they can take a ten minute walk and then write a book about it’. The subject isn’t new, Gilbert White’s ‘Natural History of Selborne’ published in 1789 is probably the origin of the species, with luminaries such as Henry David Thoreau in the nineteenth and Nan Shepherd in the twentieth shaping the agenda. But its popularity has exploded in the past twenty years; Robert MacFarlane, Helen McDonald, Nicola Chester, Ian Sinclair and Robin Lane Fox all having distinctive takes on the subject. History, memoir, adventure, mysticism, edgeland, the derive of the urban explorer, it’s all there. What this seems to say is that there is a yearning for something missing in many people’s busy, stressed, urban lives – a connection with nature and the earth which reading about it can sometimes be a substitute for, and sometimes an inspiration to get stuck in too.
For me the Lord Muck blog feels like an online diary which I can share with other gardening enthusiasts. If I wasn’t a keen gardener and observer of nature in the garden I wouldn’t have anything to write about. Looking back over the thirteen years I’ve been blogging the focus has shifted somewhat – at least in part because recent health issues have curtailed my digging, pruning, and composting exploits. There has been a shift to a more arts-based perspective, the exhibition on Soils at Somerset House (not at all what you might expect – that’s artists for you!) another on decolonising Jamaican flora, and a visit to Ian Hamilton-Finlay’s garden-cum-sculpture park at Little Sparta in the Pentland Hills outside Edinburgh. A couple of favourites penned a decade apart, were about a visit to a permaculture festival in rural Iceland – rock music in an abandoned fish processing factory, midnight feasts under the midnight sun; and a history of the turnip-as-insult. Remember that tabloid headline ‘Swedes 2 Turnips 1’ after the England football team’s defeat by Sweden in 1999? Neither had very much to do with the gentle art of gardening as commonly practiced, but they were huge fun to write!
This article first appeared in The Oxford Writer no 96, March 2026.