Flowers, pah! They’re just a waste of space. The novelist on why her garden is all about ‘growing stuff that I can eat’

I don’t understand the point of garden visits. Why do ordinary people, the owners of mere balconies and tiny yards, torment themselves by touring other people’s grand estates? Nut trees, stables, ancestral compost heaps: I need no reminder of what I am missing.

For most of us, apartment dwellers and city types, houseplants are an admission of defeat. We look wistfully at plants in the supermarket—tendrils and fronds, furry flaps, spines and holes and soft neon shoots—persuading ourselves that they might bring us comfort.

Ordinarily, my garden and I are embarrassing to be around. I can’t keep my hands off it; visitors, work, and children are all mere obstacles on the path of true pleasure.

Don’t worry; it’s perfectly normal. You live in a city, but nurse secret fantasies of growing your own supper: brimming handfuls of sweet green peas, squeakingly fresh spinach; new potatoes rolling like unearthed treasure over the soil.

Once upon a time, like most sane people, I was utterly uninterested in gardening. I wasted my time and money on reasonable things: secondhand books, dramatic spices, jackets that I hoped might transform me into the well-groomed and self-possessed novelist I still intend, one day, to become.

Haven’t you heard the stories of gardeners who, after a single rose-thorn puncture, lost an arm, or more? It’s not that I hate roses. I will acknowledge that, in certain circumstances—breeze-ruffled in the lilac dusk of a Provençal evening, say, or trained by generations of grateful college servants against honeyed Oxford limestone—a rose can achieve glory: the platonic ideal of flowers.

Dear famous gardening writers: please shut up. Of course you mean well. We, your tentative, inexperienced readers, shy of hosepipe and clumsy of secateur, appreciate your attempts to make our lives more beautiful. We share your fantasies of roses, zinnia, clematis; of bowers laden with grapes and pomegranates, or cool spaces for entertaining, with creative seating solutions and solar lighting.

Poor Jenni Murray. There she was, waiting for a calm chat about gardening on BBC Radio 4 Woman's Hour, and then I rush in