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Feather dust: a gardener’s confessions
142 pages, Paperback
Published October 2, 2024
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April 22, 2025
It's fascinating how a garden clearance odd job bod can turn into a would be gardener. In recent years, in my manor here in north east Essex where a largely retired and increasingly frail population live in bungalows and houses blessed with sizeable, once beautifully cared for front and back gardens, I have almost lost count of the number of people who've asked me to look after their plants, flowers, shrubs, trees and lawns.
It all started with weeding the beds, pruning the trees and bushes, mowing the lawns and clearing the dead foliage of the gardens of a couple of elderly residents. Within weeks their friends and contacts were on to me asking me to pop round and showing me round their gardens, telling me what they wanted doing. A few would ask questions, testing my knowledge of gardening and I'm glad they did because, to put it bluntly, it's pretty rudimentary. Many plants I can't name by looking at them, let alone knowing when to prune them, what fertiliser to give them to help them flourish, whether to dead head them, whether they're in the right position, what size they'll reach outwards and upwards.
Frankly, though it led me to expand my horticultural knowledge from vegetables and fruit to flowers and shrubs, I found the experience somewhat terrifying. Most of these prospective clients were so delighted they'd found an honest guy to look after their garden, they wanted to put me on a regular work schedule. But honest is the all important word. How could I be honest with myself or them, chomping through their gardens not really fully knowing what I was doing. I've not studied horticulture or botany and I was aware that at best I might get away with it, but at worst I could ruin someone's lifetime love.
So I've delicately declined most of the offers of work, only taking on one or two basic regular garden upkeep jobs where I'm doing what I do know what I'm doing. I always recall veteran broadcasting gardener Ken Crowther constantly advising his listeners to only employ qualified gardeners. Off air he used to tell me how undervalued real gardeners are - they've taken horticultural degrees and served apprenticeships and yet people want to employ them below the minimum wage. He's always argued that professional gardening is an expert job and that's a message that comes through loud and clear in Feather Dust - a gardener's confessions - Bob Flowerdew's Auto bybobraphy as he's called it.
From the opening pages he laments how when decided to become a gardener, he found there weren't many openings - they'd been taken by "actors, musicians, painters and other handymen - folk who had taken up gardening as another string to a somewhat threadbare bow." He's not completely damning of all these parts time jobbers but says some practiced random workmanship with an amazing lack of basic knowledge.
It's due to that he reckons, that his slightly less than incompetent service as he puts it, was to prove more than adequately sufficient by local standards. Once he got a few customers, word of mouth gave him enough clients to become busy.
He's critical of TV garden makeover programmes for their instant garden transformations. In real life, despite many customers only wanting a gardener during three season of the year, Bob Flowerdew stresses the need for jobs to be done in the winter too and writes how hard it was to convince clients they should hire him all year round.
He cites cases where hopeless gardeners before him have given the wrong advice to customers he is now serving, including some apple trees which he discovered more or less dead. He writes of how he turned that particular mini orchard around, replacing them and caring for them properly, and passing on a tip to me of defruiting a tree in its first year.
As he develops his customer base, Bob Flowerdew reveals a few tricks of the trade. Never, he writes, hoe the same area week after week because the weeds will never show and your customer might get the impression they don't need you. If you hoe every third or fourth week, it looks needy, you strike and it looks spic and span again.
He describes how he puts right, shoddy work done by gardeners before him. At one house, he's shocked that a previous gardener has put in Euphorbias either side of the steps leading down to a customer's swimming pool. Not only were they beginning to flop over the steps, but his knowledge tells him they emit a blistering sap which could lead to a trip to A and E.
Another episode has him recounting humourously but alarmingly about the danger of using a super duper powerful lawnmower over uneven ground at a place where he turns down the offer of work as it's going to be too much bother. He does though put them in touch with a mower company who can sell them the right machine.
Working in a genteel county like Norfolk with its association with royalty, you'd think everyone would be courteous and polite but not so. Hilariously he relates how there he was, on all fours weeding, when a lump of dog's poo just missed his head. Rearing up and standing on his wheelbarrow to peer over the fence, he realises it's the neighbour who's lobbed the turd. He lobs it back with and I quote "a direct hit" followed by their threats of legal action.
Later on in the book, he writes about how handy gardeners are for neighbourhood watch as they see everything going on, including would be burglars prowling around.
He appears to have some quite demanding and fastidious customers. There's one who wants him to pick the fruit from the bushes and put it in their fridge, after having erected a fruit cage and nurtured a healthy harvest. By being firm he becomes successful, always remembering that he doesn't get what he deserves, but what you negotiate.
He even has clients who are very slow at paying him or even trying to avoid paying him. He doesn't stand for any nonsense, and cites one couple where after a period of non payment for laying turf for them, he goes round and starts pulling it up. The couple soon come round.
This book has constant tips. For example,
containers he writes, need watering a lot more frequently than beds as the dry out so much quicker, so he tries to persuade customers to water them in between his visits.
On rose pruning, his advice is rewarding but technical so requires concentration as he describes the difference between pruning to win prizes with your blooms and pruning to produce a bigger number of smaller blooms.
Pompous Bob Flowerdew is not. In fact, the picture he paints of himself is the exact opposite, happy to relate to readers some of his disasters and near disasters. They include how he managed to burn down a customer's conifer tree while clearing a gravel drive of weeds.
On another day he spends hours on a new estate laying a new turf lawn in a property close to the estate's entrance, hopefully his careful work will lead to more bookings. But all's not well when the couple call him to ask when he's going to start laying their turf. He tells them he's done it. You haven't, they insist and when he goes to check, realises he's turfed the wrong garden.
So passionate about plants and gardening and creative is Bob Flowerdew that his entrepreneurial spirit comes out in this book when he advises about what to sell of your produce at the garden gate. Forget most veg and fruit he says, but think of what's popular and in demand and when. For example bunches of cut flowers ahead of Mother's Day and bunches of sweet peas always sell well as do cultivated Christmas trees.
Nowhere in this once green and pleasant land is safe from crime anymore it would seem from reading Featherdust. Bob Flowerdew writes how he had to drill a hole through the base of a concrete urn of flowers and fix a bolt and chain to secure it to mother earth to stop it being stolen after several attempts to steal it. This in sleepy Norfolk where he also says York paving and new hedges are also favourites for prowling footpads.
He also relates how all his gardening tools were stolen when his vehicle was taken by thieves and complains how difficult it was to get his insurance company to cough up compensation, as they wriggled out of his claim leaving him to conclude that much insurance in his words is a scam. By the way is there not a gardener or tradesman in England whose vehicle and tools haven't been stolen ?
I won't spoil your own enjoyment of reading Bob Flowerdew's book by telling you about his ghostly experiences that spooked him, but it's certainly very interesting to read the thoughts of a man who says he's sceptical about such things.
I think my favourite story from his book is his precarious attempt to prune the tallest tree in an orchard of old fruit trees. Anyone needing a tree surgeon in our sanitised health and safety dominated world might read his account and give him a wide berth, but his tale is so well described, it painted a humorous picture in my head, prompting the question, would he or wouldn't he.
This is a rudimentary collection of memories, presented in an unconventional fashion, as if he's put them to paper as he's remembered them without an editor to suggest a structure or proof reader to check for grammar. The beauty of this style of self publication is that it's in the style as you would hear him speak on BBC Radio 4, where he comes across as a wise, interesting, resourceful, gentle, slightly odd character. The difference between his book and broadcasts is, I suspect, that he doesn't hold back in his book with his observations and comments, and that is very welcome.
It all started with weeding the beds, pruning the trees and bushes, mowing the lawns and clearing the dead foliage of the gardens of a couple of elderly residents. Within weeks their friends and contacts were on to me asking me to pop round and showing me round their gardens, telling me what they wanted doing. A few would ask questions, testing my knowledge of gardening and I'm glad they did because, to put it bluntly, it's pretty rudimentary. Many plants I can't name by looking at them, let alone knowing when to prune them, what fertiliser to give them to help them flourish, whether to dead head them, whether they're in the right position, what size they'll reach outwards and upwards.
Frankly, though it led me to expand my horticultural knowledge from vegetables and fruit to flowers and shrubs, I found the experience somewhat terrifying. Most of these prospective clients were so delighted they'd found an honest guy to look after their garden, they wanted to put me on a regular work schedule. But honest is the all important word. How could I be honest with myself or them, chomping through their gardens not really fully knowing what I was doing. I've not studied horticulture or botany and I was aware that at best I might get away with it, but at worst I could ruin someone's lifetime love.
So I've delicately declined most of the offers of work, only taking on one or two basic regular garden upkeep jobs where I'm doing what I do know what I'm doing. I always recall veteran broadcasting gardener Ken Crowther constantly advising his listeners to only employ qualified gardeners. Off air he used to tell me how undervalued real gardeners are - they've taken horticultural degrees and served apprenticeships and yet people want to employ them below the minimum wage. He's always argued that professional gardening is an expert job and that's a message that comes through loud and clear in Feather Dust - a gardener's confessions - Bob Flowerdew's Auto bybobraphy as he's called it.
From the opening pages he laments how when decided to become a gardener, he found there weren't many openings - they'd been taken by "actors, musicians, painters and other handymen - folk who had taken up gardening as another string to a somewhat threadbare bow." He's not completely damning of all these parts time jobbers but says some practiced random workmanship with an amazing lack of basic knowledge.
It's due to that he reckons, that his slightly less than incompetent service as he puts it, was to prove more than adequately sufficient by local standards. Once he got a few customers, word of mouth gave him enough clients to become busy.
He's critical of TV garden makeover programmes for their instant garden transformations. In real life, despite many customers only wanting a gardener during three season of the year, Bob Flowerdew stresses the need for jobs to be done in the winter too and writes how hard it was to convince clients they should hire him all year round.
He cites cases where hopeless gardeners before him have given the wrong advice to customers he is now serving, including some apple trees which he discovered more or less dead. He writes of how he turned that particular mini orchard around, replacing them and caring for them properly, and passing on a tip to me of defruiting a tree in its first year.
As he develops his customer base, Bob Flowerdew reveals a few tricks of the trade. Never, he writes, hoe the same area week after week because the weeds will never show and your customer might get the impression they don't need you. If you hoe every third or fourth week, it looks needy, you strike and it looks spic and span again.
He describes how he puts right, shoddy work done by gardeners before him. At one house, he's shocked that a previous gardener has put in Euphorbias either side of the steps leading down to a customer's swimming pool. Not only were they beginning to flop over the steps, but his knowledge tells him they emit a blistering sap which could lead to a trip to A and E.
Another episode has him recounting humourously but alarmingly about the danger of using a super duper powerful lawnmower over uneven ground at a place where he turns down the offer of work as it's going to be too much bother. He does though put them in touch with a mower company who can sell them the right machine.
Working in a genteel county like Norfolk with its association with royalty, you'd think everyone would be courteous and polite but not so. Hilariously he relates how there he was, on all fours weeding, when a lump of dog's poo just missed his head. Rearing up and standing on his wheelbarrow to peer over the fence, he realises it's the neighbour who's lobbed the turd. He lobs it back with and I quote "a direct hit" followed by their threats of legal action.
Later on in the book, he writes about how handy gardeners are for neighbourhood watch as they see everything going on, including would be burglars prowling around.
He appears to have some quite demanding and fastidious customers. There's one who wants him to pick the fruit from the bushes and put it in their fridge, after having erected a fruit cage and nurtured a healthy harvest. By being firm he becomes successful, always remembering that he doesn't get what he deserves, but what you negotiate.
He even has clients who are very slow at paying him or even trying to avoid paying him. He doesn't stand for any nonsense, and cites one couple where after a period of non payment for laying turf for them, he goes round and starts pulling it up. The couple soon come round.
This book has constant tips. For example,
containers he writes, need watering a lot more frequently than beds as the dry out so much quicker, so he tries to persuade customers to water them in between his visits.
On rose pruning, his advice is rewarding but technical so requires concentration as he describes the difference between pruning to win prizes with your blooms and pruning to produce a bigger number of smaller blooms.
Pompous Bob Flowerdew is not. In fact, the picture he paints of himself is the exact opposite, happy to relate to readers some of his disasters and near disasters. They include how he managed to burn down a customer's conifer tree while clearing a gravel drive of weeds.
On another day he spends hours on a new estate laying a new turf lawn in a property close to the estate's entrance, hopefully his careful work will lead to more bookings. But all's not well when the couple call him to ask when he's going to start laying their turf. He tells them he's done it. You haven't, they insist and when he goes to check, realises he's turfed the wrong garden.
So passionate about plants and gardening and creative is Bob Flowerdew that his entrepreneurial spirit comes out in this book when he advises about what to sell of your produce at the garden gate. Forget most veg and fruit he says, but think of what's popular and in demand and when. For example bunches of cut flowers ahead of Mother's Day and bunches of sweet peas always sell well as do cultivated Christmas trees.
Nowhere in this once green and pleasant land is safe from crime anymore it would seem from reading Featherdust. Bob Flowerdew writes how he had to drill a hole through the base of a concrete urn of flowers and fix a bolt and chain to secure it to mother earth to stop it being stolen after several attempts to steal it. This in sleepy Norfolk where he also says York paving and new hedges are also favourites for prowling footpads.
He also relates how all his gardening tools were stolen when his vehicle was taken by thieves and complains how difficult it was to get his insurance company to cough up compensation, as they wriggled out of his claim leaving him to conclude that much insurance in his words is a scam. By the way is there not a gardener or tradesman in England whose vehicle and tools haven't been stolen ?
I won't spoil your own enjoyment of reading Bob Flowerdew's book by telling you about his ghostly experiences that spooked him, but it's certainly very interesting to read the thoughts of a man who says he's sceptical about such things.
I think my favourite story from his book is his precarious attempt to prune the tallest tree in an orchard of old fruit trees. Anyone needing a tree surgeon in our sanitised health and safety dominated world might read his account and give him a wide berth, but his tale is so well described, it painted a humorous picture in my head, prompting the question, would he or wouldn't he.
This is a rudimentary collection of memories, presented in an unconventional fashion, as if he's put them to paper as he's remembered them without an editor to suggest a structure or proof reader to check for grammar. The beauty of this style of self publication is that it's in the style as you would hear him speak on BBC Radio 4, where he comes across as a wise, interesting, resourceful, gentle, slightly odd character. The difference between his book and broadcasts is, I suspect, that he doesn't hold back in his book with his observations and comments, and that is very welcome.
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