If you want to make it on the allotment, dress to impress

Let’s stop pretending. The reason we garden isn’t to fill our loved ones with anthocyanins and curcuminoids. (Hungry, darling? Have a Pringle.) It’s nothing to do with growing our own creamy-white dahlias, or medicinal herbs for tisanes; we’re not in it for the mindfulness, or exercise, or the environment. And we’re definitely not saving money. No: we’re in it for the trousers.

Well, technically, the whole shebang, hat to shoes. In adult life, most mainstream interests don’t justify a complete new look. Knitting, opera, whale-watching? Come as you are. The only way to justify an entirely different set of clothes is to take up either a niche and slightly dangerous pursuit – beekeeping, polyamory – or a sport, which often involves polyester. But become a gardener and… behold! You need to dress appropriately, but what that means is entirely up to you.

It’s like the sixth form – post-uniform, there are so many options. So who will you be? The Waitrosian: forgiving velvet top in Dixter damson, beneath a monogrammed sailcloth smock, extremely high-end, multi-season, subtly supportive legwear, floral gauntlets (so important to stay feminine) and point-to-point-worthy wellingtons? Twinkly Dad, in an unthreatening cotton crew-neck, moisture-wicking, zippable vented trousers with integral ruler-pocket, maybe a cheeky gilet? Do you strive for Foxy Ophelia, in a cross-backed cherry-blossom patterned linen apron (handwash only) over apple-blossom patterned linen dungarees over rosebud-patterned off-shoulder muslin blousery, precariously fastened with a single coconut-shell button?

In the olden days, gardeners, by which I mean rich people who pointed at things, had a much simpler range of choices. Ursula Buchan’s book Garden People is a joy forever, thanks to the photographs by Valerie Finnis of the wildly stylish horticulturalists of yesteryear. Men comprised entirely of tweed; women in heavyweight silk and bosomy primrose cashmere, pearls, kerchiefs, culottes, Swiss capes, gilt buttons and tailored houndstooth, like Katharine Hepburn in a Bavarian heatwave. Forget, if you can, turbanned Dame Miriam Rothschild’s white bootees, even Vita Sackville-West’s breeches and gaiters (Noel Coward described her as ‘Lady Chatterley above the waist and the gamekeeper below’, though I’m not sure that’s the right way round).All I want is one day of gardening like Rhoda, Lady Birley, photographed in high-waisted corduroy, gaucho-hat akimbo, red loppers ready to go.

But the unhinged drama of Vogue-worthy plus-fours and pruning mittens has, sadly, passed. T hese days we aspire to artisanal hunkiness. Call it workhousewear, humblecore – hardcorechorecore – but keep the colours sludgy, the fabrics scratchy, the unnecessary leather garnishes British-made. We may aim for the genuine chic of Niwaki’s Kojima selvedge denim, or Toast’s garment-dyed, carpenter-patch, indigo wide-legs, but most people compromise with a bargain rip-proof work pant from Mountain Warehouse; pair off-cobalt faux-Breton stevedore blousons with inadvisable moustachery; even veer into the faintly fascistic hard aesthetic of woven braces and deep turn-ups on their weird stout-twill mock-serf pantaloons.

Not me. I may, in normal life, be self-conscious, sartorially uncertain, mostly dressed in jumpsuits or my more stylish friends’ cast-offs. But when it comes to gardening outfits, I radiate verve, possibly genius. I have two great role models to thank. First, my father, circa 1983. During the week, a fine figure of a man in his Marks & Sparks Italian wool suiting; at weekends, genuinely demented-looking, planting daffodil bulbs in his mossy-grey, flared elephant cords, plimsolls and a baby-blue C&A ski jacket, stuffing leaking through the thorn-rips.

Second, my late friend, the great literary agent Pat Kavanagh. She was cool, private, beautiful, dauntingly clever. She believed in me as a writer. Even more disastrously, she passed on her addiction to gardening. One of the last times she visited to supervise my tomato side-shoot tying-in technique, she wore tight tan Italian-military trousers with ankle-zips, a superbly well-tucked blue shirt and green eyeshadow to match her famous eyes. Pat showed me that one did not have to wear fleeces to garden. I miss her. But oh, she’d hate my allotment outfit.

Everything is old. Not merely old, totally knackered. The only improvement would be complete nudity, perhaps with a leathery hide, or light but flattering chainmail. Behold my hideous French-supermarket hiking boots, enhanced with manure. Suede-soft jeans, thrice mended, profoundly dated (pre-skinny, pre-bootleg, possibly right back to straight). One of two T-shirts: student-era mothy off-black or tight red Surely not everybody was Kung-Fu fighting, which I will never stop finding hilarious. And, like gold dust on caviar, the extra rows of diamonds added to Queen Camilla’s Greville Festoon Necklace, my crowning glory, a third-hand Topshop maternity shirt in pale denim, mostly holes, lower section ripped away for that all-important asymmetrical line. It’s like wearing a cobweb: breathe wrongly and it’ll vanish.

But how I love it. I never feel more confident, fuller of frisk and swagger, than when I’m on my way, winding through the performative parents queuing for the farmers’ market (“no, Luna, the cherry juice”) in this, my most ancient and peculiar outfit. I’ll never be Rhoda, Lady Birley, but in my ragged double-denim I am a cowboy, a pirate, a buccaneer, lightly spattered with worm urine. I am, entirely, myself.