The Author

Richard Mortimer is the pen name of a London medical practitioner who was educated at Malvern, Cambridge and Bart's, none of which is the least bit relevant to the book. However, he has had a life-long interest in gardening since growing radishes and lettuces in his sand-pit, which he considered much more interesting than whatever else he was meant to be doing there.

Following his unwitting contribution to the war effort, he has struggled unremittingly to establish seaside gardens and gardens on other unpromising plots like shady, damp London courtyards, and, for the past 30 years, on a windswept, sandy and rocky site on the edge of the sea. It is the latter experience, along with the development of another courtyard, this one in Alderney, that moved him to write the book, which is dedicated with sympathy to all other gardeners sharing the same battles against wind and usually drought.

Below are some excerpts from the book,

“A lot of gardens I know are old style cottage hospitals with hard pressed part-time staff running around tending sickly plants whose tenuous hold on life is entirely dependent... Close coverage of bare soil cuts down on evaproation and suppresses weed and grass growth. Rain and dew is trapped, and a beneficient humid localised micro-climate forms which wind cannot entirely disperse. Heat cannot effectively penetrate dense foilage, and root runs are consequently cooler and more moist. Conversely, during cold snaps, the soil is insulated by foilage, and heat is thereby conserved, thus discouraging the formation of ground frost locally.”