I CAN’T help it. Every time a friend tells me that they bought their house because of the wonderfully friable, medium loam soil in the garden, I gnash my teeth. How I should love to have bought such a house. But I freely chose to live in Northamptonshire, where there’s a good chance that any house for sale will have a garden on an unforgiving alkaline clay. This soil bakes hard in summer and is slippery, wet
