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An interview with the author Ken Thompson

1. If you had to come up with a one-sentence description of your book (and you do), what would you say?
With apologies to George W. Bush, I'd say it's the road map to peace with your garden.

2. Why did you write it?
The average gardener probably knows little about what is going on in his or her garden. This may impair their enjoyment of their garden and, from a purely practical point of view, sometimes leads to activities that either don't really need doing, or are unlikely to succeed. It dawned on me that nobody was trying to tell gardeners about this.

3. Who were you thinking of when you wrote it?
Any gardener who enjoys reading the words in a gardening magazine as much as looking at the pictures. Any gardener who wants to work with their garden rather than against it.

4. Please tell us something of your professional background, and the path by which you arrived at the first blank page of AN EAR TO THE GROUND.
I've been an academic plant ecologist all my life, mostly at Plymouth Polytechnic (now the University of Plymouth) and here at Sheffield University. For most of that time, I've also been a keen gardener, but for many years I failed to make the connection between gardening and science. I have to keep up with the scientific literature as part of my job, but increasingly I found myself reading things that weren't really relevant to my academic work, but were relevant to gardening. I think the stimulus to actually sit down and start writing was a scientific paper that explained why you can't grow rhododendrons on limestone. I thought, "I have to tell someone about this".

5. Why don't you watch gardening programmes on tv?
Years ago, I used to watch Gardeners' World a lot. Then, at around the same time, two things happened. The first was the death of Geoff Hamilton, which I still haven't quite got over. I thought he was irreplaceable. The second was the fashion for 'makeover' programmes, which I think promoted two quite pernicious ideas. One is that the perfect garden can be created overnight, which it can't. The other was the idea that a garden can somehow be 'finished', like a room or a painting, so that all you have to do is sit and enjoy it. To any serious gardener, such an idea is anathema. Gardens are living, growing things, and can no more be 'completed' than can a human being.
Having said all that, I think we are now emerging from this period of 'makeover madness', and I also think Monty Don has got potential. So maybe I can go back to being a Gardeners' World addict again.

6. What next?
I still have a full-time day job, which is why it took me five years to write An Ear to the Ground, and why I won't have another book finished by next week. On the other hand, there are still things I want to say. There's a chapter about garden wildlife in An Ear to the Ground, but this is another area that's riven with misunderstanding, so there's room for a whole book on that. I also have an idea for a book on biodiversity, and why and how we should be conserving it. I also enjoy writing my regular column for Organic Gardening magazine, so I may do more of that sort of thing in the future, if anybody wants it!