Dame Mary Berry may be famed for her great cooking skills, recipes and mouthwatering bakes, but her passion for gardening comes a close second.

The baker has now written My Gardening Life on her life, memories and what gardening means to her, interwoven with advice from the experts she has learned from.

She has spoken of the solace she has taken from gardening, from her first tiny garden in London to her huge 3.5-acre plot at Watercroft in Bucks and her current one-acre garden in Henley-on-Thames, Oxon, which was started six years ago from scratch.

The Grade II listed Penn estate of Watercroft House and Watercroft Cottage was the home to the national treasure and her husband, Paul Hunnings, between 1988 and 2019.

After deciding to downsize from the nine-bedroom property, they sold the house for £2.4m, along with an additional £600,000 for the cottage.

The Watercroft Estate in Penn (Image: Savills)

“Over the years, the garden has been a great solace and a place I love to be.

"Whatever life may bring, being out in the garden usually makes me feel a little bit better about it,” the Dame writes.

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Having a garden has helped her through difficult times, she agrees.

She has a bed of sweet williams (Dianthus barbatus), dedicated to her late son, William, who died in a car accident aged 19 in 1989.

She has said she counts herself as “very fortunate” to have two other children, five grandchildren and her husband, Paul Hunnings.

“When we lost William, we were very much in the garden, planning, planting, and lovely friends gave us plants, which I brought with me in memory, and I still look at them and think of the happy times we had with him.”

She also brought other plants people had given her including a white Christmas rose (Helleborus niger).

“People gave us hellebores and I’ve made a hellebore bed and added to it. Just when you’re going by, you remember. We’ve nothing but wonderful memories of William and it’s nice to be reminded of him.”

She also took primroses that originally came from her mother’s garden in Bath.

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Famed for not having arguments with her husband, Berry tends to go into the garden and the greenhouse to cool off if she’s miffed.

“If something’s irritating me – for instance if I say I’ve got something lovely for supper and then my other half says, ‘Actually, I’m not very hungry because I had two pieces of cake at tea,’ am I going to say something? No, I’m going in the garden.

“And by the time suppertime comes he’ll enjoy whatever I’ve cooked. It’s not worth having an argument.”

She has a gardener, Kevin Pryce, who has been with her for 32 years and does the lion’s share.

At 90, Berry doesn’t do as much as she used to in the garden.

She’s a huge fan of BBC Gardeners’ World but she doesn’t watch The Great British Bake Off, she confesses.

“I don’t think it’s fair on my husband. We’re testing recipes all the time, thinking what’s going in the next book, talking recipes. It’s not fair on my husband in the evening to turn on a cooking programme, because he’s seen quite enough of it.”

My Gardening Life by Mary Berry is published in hardback by DK, priced £25.