The Garden in the Clouds

I very rarely fail to finish a book, but I had to give up on this one about two thirds of the way in for the sake of my blood pressure. On the face of it I should have loved it - I love gardens, I love the Black Mountains and I dream of someday running away to live more sustainably somewhere beautiful. The start though was unpromising, involving the author explaining how he'd never liked gardens but wanted to create one at a deeply unpromising elevation just to prove he could, and it went downhill from there. Every chapter seemed to follow the formula "I wanted a (tractor/orchard/beehive/wildflower meadow) even though I know nothing about (tractors/orchards/beehves/wildflower meadows) so I spent a ridiculous amount of money on equipment and set about trying to operate/own one in the most impractical way possible, not because of out of any commitment to sustainablity or for the sake of experimentation but because I WANTED TO DO IT THAT WAY. Unsurprisingly it all turned into a massive clusterfuck so I paid someone ridiculous amounts of money to fix it." Even this could have been redeemed by a sympathetic narrator or some engaging characters, but I found the author mindbogglingly arrogant with his blithe assumption that none of these rural skills could be too difficult to master if these picturesque rustics could manage it. His lack of respect for the landscape and the people around him who were trying to scrape an increasingly marginal living from it rather than playing hobby farmer was cringeworthy too - I was actually biting my knuckles for the passage where he destroyed a track that his neighbours were presumably actually using for work trying to haul a twenty ton railway carriage up a mountain with the aid of a crane (he also destroyed a SSI and one of his neighbour's walls, which, while he doesn't say, I assume was probably enclosing livestock). And he didn't put much effort into getting his wife's character onto the page - all she seemed to do was get pregnant and get cold.

My reaction is in part, I suppose, jealousy - he's living my dream and doing it very, very badly. And I suppose he has poured a lot of money in the local economy. But unfortunately part of the reason it's so hard for young people to make a living in the countryside and keep it viable is because of rich city folk like him pushing houseprices to unaffordable levels because they want to live in the country without actually working there and without even appreciating it much - I have no sympathy for someone who apparently never looked out of a window and saw a bird, and who spent a couple of paragraphs lamenting that his mountain view wasn't as dramatic as he'd have liked it to be.