I grew up on the rural Isle of Man. As a child I was surrounded by folk tales of fairies and the coconut scented gorse that festoons the country there.

My grandmother is a marvelous gardener; natural, and totally self taught. She would gather arm fulls of flowers from garden; nothing even loosely resembling uniformity: beech branches, buddleja, and even pots of Swiss-chard were used for decoration.

I remember so vividly cutting a bouquet with her one evening, to give to my mother as an act of repentance for being a naughty boy. I still have the little orange handled scissors that we used that very evening, when I was no taller than her waist.

My love for plants grew as I did. I remember a delightful old gentleman called Mr Quinn gifting me a sensitive plant, aged eight or nine years old, and showing me how to pollinate tomatoes in his greenhouse with the “tickling stick”, and from then I was hooked. I think the first thing that I ever grew successfully myself was a single, ginormous mushroom in my mother’s airing cupboard... I shan’t go into details as to how that came about, but I managed it nonetheless!

After leaving school and my job in the local nursery, I moved to Oxfordshire. I settled in Chipping Norton and spent the next few years working with hounds and horses, but my green thumbs soon began to itch.

In 2018, I began a small vegetable garden, which, with the assistance of a national “lockdown” shortly afterwards, swiftly developed into a cut flower garden, a growing space for exhibition vegetables, and a haven for wildlife, friends and my darling whippets.

I started growing flowers for local farmers markets and deliveries, florists and the local cafe. A year or so later, I did my first wedding.