‘My marriage was very happy but there was a point where I realised I was lying to someone I really cared about’ 

Gardening guru Alys Fowler was happily married to a man for over a decade. Then she fell in love with a woman, writes Julia Molony

CHANGED TIMES: Alys Fowler has opened up about her new relationship. Photo: Ben Stevens

Tucked away in the plush library room at her publisher’s office in central London, Alys Fowler is contemplating whether it is a mid-life crisis that has led her here. She will turn 40 later this year and has written a new book — one that is vastly different to the ones that have gone before — the glossy coffee-table gardening guides which feature her cheery, sun-lit face on the cover.

Perhaps, she concludes, it is rather a “mid-life reckoning” that inspired her beautifully written latest work, Hidden Nature: A Voyage of Discovery. That title has a double meaning. In part, it is a straight-forward piece of nature writing — a journey into the unexpected wild places Fowler discovered when she decided, driven by some arcane impulse that perplexed those around to her, to start exploring the canal waterways of Birmingham in a fold-up canoe. But this physical adventure accompanied an even more transformational internal one. Over the last few years she ended her marriage after 14 years and started a new relationship with a woman. “I definitely didn’t set out to write the book as it is,” she says. “I was going to write a book about messing around on the Birmingham canals. I’m really interested in urban nature and how cities can become more sustainable, how nature works in cities, how wild exists even in places where you could imagine it might not have a place,” she says. But the project morphed into a kind of journal, and it was the act of writing everything down that forced her to acknowledge parts of herself that might otherwise have remained obscure.