"I'm not dead yet," writes Clare Hastings to her daughter, Calypso, who will one day inherit Clare's beloved cottage garden in the Berkshire Downs. "In fact I woke up this morning feeling quite chipper. I glanced out of the window . . . and thought about you. And felt a frisson of panic. What if I were to be struck down before elevenses on the B4009? I realized that I needed to leave you a handbook about the garden. For you the countryside is a pathway from the car park to the door, to be completed on the run. But I'm not giving up."

The daughter of writer and gardener Anne Scott-James, Clare too was a latecomer to gardening, daunted by Latin names and nervous around plants. Then she realized she wasn't and never would be a 'proper plantsman' and that it didn't matter. Since then she has explored the joys of gardening and now after many years' experience of her own cottage garden, Clare shares her gardening life notes with Calypso.

"A amusing read...but there is also plenty of practical advice. Comical illustrations by Osbert Lancaster add to the book's charm." * House and Garden *
"Unusual, charming and, at times, very funny." * Morning Star *

Clare Hastings started her career in the fashion department of Harpers & Queen magazine, before leaving to work freelance as a stylist and later as a costume designer. Thirty years later, Clare changed direction to work freelance alongside her daughter, Calypso, in The Indytute. Sir Osbert Lancaster (1908-1986) was a painter, a writer, a cartoonist, a theatre designer, an authority on architecture and design, and above all a great British humorist. His pocket cartoons depicting the aristocratic Maudie Littlehampton, her family and friends, which appeared in the Daily Express for forty years, recorded in his inimitably English way the life, news and opinions of the period. His books on architecture and design were as witty as they were authoritative: in them he depicted buildings and interiors with an unerring instinct for the minutiae of stylistic change and recreated with irrepressible humour the way of life of the original inhabitants.