Garden in the Clouds

When I was visiting my friend's new house, she lent me a book to read. It's called Garden in the Clouds, by Antony Woodward, and the writer is going to be speaking at Hay Festival this year.
He lives somewhere in the triangle formed between Hay, Crickhowell and Abergavenny, up high in the Black Mountains, and when he moved in to the old farmhouse his dream was to open his garden to the public as part of the National Gardens Scheme. The book is about the trials and tribulations of achieving that dream.
On the way, he has to contend with sheep: "Surely once a field was properly fenced, the sheep would be excluded (or contained)" he says optimistically. Which made me laugh - the sheep around here are trained by the SAS, as he was shortly to discover!
He joins Marcher Apple Network, and starts to keep bees, and gets a railway carriage to the top of the hill to use as a garden room in an operation akin to the epic moving of the lifeboat in The Overland Launch, knocking down walls, using tractors and JCBs and a crane, and creating a scene of devastation up the side of the hill.
It's great fun to read, and I expect the talk will be entertaining as well.