Having a garden has brought me great solace

Dame Mary Berry tells HANNAH STEPHENSON how gardening has helped her through good times and bad

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A happy gardener: Dame Mary Berry

DAME Mary Berry may be famed for her great cooking skills, foolproof recipes and mouthwatering bakes, but her passion for gardening comes a close second.

While she claims to be no expert and over the years has taken advice from top plantsmen and women including Alan Titchmarsh, Jekka McVicar, Bunny Guinness and Sarah Raven, she was also president of the National Garden Scheme for a decade and is an RHS ambassador.

She's a huge fan of BBC Gardeners’ World but she doesn’t watch The Great British Bake Off, she confesses.

She has now written My Gardening Life, jottings on her life and memories and what gardening means to her, interwoven with advice from the experts she has learned from.

It also details her favourite plants and offers seasonal advice based on her own experience, from her first tiny garden in London to her huge 3.5 acre plot at Watercroft in Buckinghamshire and her current one-acre garden in Henley-on-Thames, Oxon, which was started six years ago from scratch.

“Over the years, the garden has been a great solace and a place I love to be. Whatever life may bring, being out in the garden usually makes me feel a little bit better about it,” she writes.

Having a garden has helped her through difficult times, she agrees.

She has a bed of sweet williams (Dianthus barbatus), dedicated to her late son, William, who died in a car accident aged 19 in 1989.

She has said she counts herself as “very fortunate” to have two other children, five grandchildren and her husband, Paul Hunnings.