“Andrew Timothy O’Brien is an online gardening coach, writer and host of the critically acclaimed Gardens, Weeds & Words podcast. His mission is to help us to understand our place in the world through the plants with which we chose to surround ourselves, whether the garden we know best is outside our house, on the window ledge, or found within that familiar patch of weeds we gaze at each morning while waiting for the bus.”

That’s the blurb from my first book – To Stand and Stare – by way of introduction. What it leaves out is that, above everything else, I think of myself as a gardener, and that by the time I launched my online garden coaching programme in December 2019 I’d been gardening for other people for ten years. A gardener occupies a privileged position in the household (assuming a ready supply of tea and biscuits, without which the relationship is doomed). Invited in at the point when juggling the demands of the garden, work and family becomes too much to handle, we’re called upon to help out in the areas our clients lack the time or expertise to manage. If we’re doing our jobs properly, we get to enthuse, teach and advise, as well as looking after the plants that we’re ostensibly there to tend. Many of us naturally find ourselves in a coaching role by default, and I came to realise that this aspect of being a gardener was something I could share more widely online. A year of garden coaching was born, and through this I’ve been fortunate enough to work with gardeners all over the world; from just a few miles down the road in Kent to Scotland, Northern Ireland, Germany, the US and even Australia.

If you like the sound of A year of garden coaching and are considering signing up, might I direct you to the Gardens, Weeds & Words podcast first? If you listen to a few episodes, as well as having a scroll through some of my posts on Instagram where more of my free gardening content finds its way into the world, you’ll get a good feel for my own particular brand of gardening and how fit this wonderful pastime into our daily existence. If this resonates with you, that’s great – I think we might be a good fit. And if not, well...that’s fine too. It’s best to make these decisions with as much information as possible.

For more of my writing, there’s over a decade’s worth of gardening blog posts, including two years (2019 and 2021) where I posted every day, on the Gardens, Weeds & Words blog, or you can sign up to my (mostly) monthly newsletter here. But come and find me over on Instagram, or get in touch here. I’m always happy to chat.