When Katherine Swift took on the esoteric title of Keeper of Rare Books at Trinity College Dublin, she left her husband, Ken, behind in their house in Oxford and commuted between the two cities each week. She loved her scholarly work in the grave, beautiful library with its great showpiece, the Book of Kells, and she adored Dublin: “I made good friends in what was then a raffish, exciting, interesting city.” But Ken Swift was not thrilled with the arrangement. They had met at university – Katherine was only 21 when they married – and he missed her. She had often said that what she would like to do, above all, was to make a garden. A serious garden, not grand necessarily, but not a suburban patch either. “Every Friday night Ken would meet me at Heathrow with a sheaf of estate agents’ particulars,” she says. “It was his plan to lure me home. There were diminutive Georgian manor houses we couldn’t afford, gaunt brick ruins with walled gardens filled with nettles, sagging timber-framed palaces…”

Then he found the Dower House at Morville Hall in Shropshire, a National Trust property offered for lease to applicants considered by the Trust to be “the right kind of people”. She first saw it alone, driving through the winter dusk on a Friday from the ferry at Holyhead, arriving after nightfall, leaving the car and walking down the avenue, feeling her way in the blackness. She sensed, rather than saw, the high horizon of a wooded hill, the bowl of land cradling the turrets, pavilions and cupolas of the big house. The windows of the dark, untenanted Dower House “yielded nothing”. It was enough; this was where she would make her garden: “I’d finally found what I wanted to do.”

Twenty years later, she and I sit in the library of the Dower House: white walls, white linen-covered sofas, red silk curtains and a blazing log fire. There is Darjeeling tea and toast, a choice of damson jam, honey and Gentleman’s Relish. Outside the tall sash windows, rain falls steadily on the garden, dimpling the surface of a long, slender canal with its border of tulips and crown imperials, drenching the rose beds with their supports of pillar and rope swag, bouncing off the beehives in the wild garden, soaking down to the seeds of poppy, valerian and wolfsbane yet to snout up through the mix of red soil and rich, black compost.

What was once an acre of rough grassland grazed by cows has become a series of garden rooms enclosed by 12ft-high yew hedges, each echoing a period of the house’s history and the ghosts of its previous inhabitants, Eliot’s “footfalls in the memory”. Digging over the ground, Swift found fragments of china, white marble floor tiles, broken clay pipes, opaque slivers of medieval glass “blue as snow-melt”, and wondered: “Who drank from that cup, who smoked that pipe, who looked through that window?”

The kitchen garden was the first to be planted: “So Ken could have vegetables to cook with.” By now he had moved his bookshop to nearby Ludlow: “He did all the shopping and made dinner every night, so I didn’t have to think about anything except the garden.” She worked alone each day till the light ran out, sometimes longer, feeling her way; everything was grown from seed or cuttings. “We had no money; it took six weeks to dig 1,000ft of 2ft-wide trenches for the yew hedges in stony ground, and I had tennis elbow by the end; I was often so tired I crawled up to bed on my hands and knees.”

As she laboured on, the church clock kept time, striking the quarter hour, recording the progress of her day. “It provided a kind of basso continuo to life at Morville.” She recalled her mother’s copy of the Book of Hours, and the calendar that prefaced it with its illustrations of the horticultural and agricultural tasks allotted to each month: “Keeping Warm and Chopping Wood” in February, “Mowing” in June, “Ploughing and Sowing” in October, “Slaughtering and Baking” in November. The chiming of the clock, the rhythm of the seasons, the sense that she was part of a continuous cycle of life, death and renewal had a profound effect: she would write her own book of hours, recording the arc of a year in time past and time present.

The Morville Hours took 14 years to complete: a work of extraordinary lyrical beauty, both scholarly and poetic, the incantatory naming of things and the writing at times so erotic it makes you weak at the knees. It is a book of fragments – gleaned from the soil, from the stories of neighbours, from record books, from liturgy. But there are, too, fragments from her own story, shards of painful memory: her mother telling her, “Having you ruined my life”; her grandmother, Ada, warning her father: “You’ll swing for that temper”; a terrible row between her father and her husband followed by 30 years of estrangement. “Making the garden mended all of the broken heart and pain of childhood,” says Swift. “Writing the book made things clearer – it was a kind of expiation.”

When she started on her garden she realised how much she owed her father, who had always made gardens wherever they lived, taking cuttings from place to place: “We moved a great deal; he was always taking umbrage at something or someone, falling out with a boss or a neighbour.” She began to include him and his gardening exploits in her book: “Then I felt mean, not writing about Mother; eventually, I had to explain this fearsome pair.”

Her parents, she writes, had a knack for starting over, for reinventing themselves, changing jobs, changing places, changing religion, both continually in a ferment of new ideas, literary, political, philosophical, theological. They were educated out of the working class, but never arrived in the middle, and were uncomfortable with both. Each move meant a new school for Katherine and her brother.

“We never had people round,” she tells me. “We were the ultimate nuclear family, all on our own.” Her parents had tempestuous rows – “My mother would sit weeping at the breakfast table, ‘I only stay for you,’ she said” – and their children were required to take sides: “She enlisted me, always, against Pa, whom I loved.” Later, when she was married, and her father fell out with her husband, she was forced to choose again: “I felt I had to be loyal to Ken.” Father and daughter were reunited after 30 years when he was ill with dementia and her mother moved them down to Shropshire. “I looked after them for seven years; they only had me and the kindness of strangers.”

Outside the cheerful warmth of the library and the kitchen with its ancient Rayburn, the house has an austere chill familiar to anyone who has lived before the advent of central heating. It smells of wood and Imperial Leather soap and the faint citrus tang of the ornamental Seville orange trees, over-wintering in the front hall with its galleried upstairs passageways. One year, Swift was snowed in, alone, roads blocked, power lines brought down by ice: she sat and read by candlelight in an armchair pulled up to the fire, shutters closed, “the tapestries stirring in the draught, carpets lifting on the bare boards of the corridors”. She was, she says, supremely content: “Isolation: it’s what I do best. Gardening, reading and writing. All solitary pleasures.”

She has no children: “I discovered soon after we were married that Ken didn’t want them.” Wasn’t that a terrible shock? Wasn’t she angry that he hadn’t mentioned it? “Well, no, I was a bit surprised, but I was only 22, not thinking at all about babies.” Her own mother suffered “catastrophic” postnatal depression after her birth – “Don’t have children, dear,” said her parents. “I think that was a really good piece of advice,” she says now. “I didn’t want to risk putting myself through what my mother went through. It was entirely selfish, really.”

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