When Andrew Oldham was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes in his late forties, his doctor didn’t mince her words.
“She gave me an ultimatum, which was quite harsh really,” he said when he joined us on the BBC Gardeners’ World Magazine Podcast.
“She said I had a choice: I could reverse it. I had, I think, a three-to-six-month window. ‘Or,’ she said, ‘at some point in your future, you’re going to lose your feet’.”
For Andrew, a gardener and writer living in the Pennines, it was a terrifying wake-up call, but not an unfamiliar one.
Two decades earlier, a car accident had left him with spinal damage and the slow, painful task of relearning how to walk.
“Obviously, when you’re learning to walk again in your late 20s, it’s not as easy as when you’re a toddler. I was in a lot of pain and I ended up getting quite depressed and sad about it. It was my consultant who recommended that I take up gardening,” he says.
“I only had a small cottage garden [at the time], but it really did pull me out of a very dark place. And that’s how I got into gardening. It’s the idea of planting a seed. And then that seed becomes something.
“I think it took roughly between 18 months and two years for me to give up things like walking sticks. I was in a wheelchair for a while, and it did open my eyes to how people are treated when they’re in a wheelchair.”
Rebuilding a life, again
So with this latest, terrifying medical news of a type 2 diabetes diagnosis, received just before the start of the growing season in late winter, Andrew once again turned to his garden for renewal.
Within weeks, his seed potatoes for that season, lovingly chitted and ready to plant, had been given away. He knew that potatoes were off-limits, being too starchy.
“Then I looked into carrots and found out they are a no-no; they’re an occasional treat because they’re still high in sugars,” he says.
“I found out that anything that grew above ground was okay for me. So I started to experiment with things like different types of lettuces.”
That was the start of a radical lifestyle change rooted in the soil. By swapping supermarket staples for homegrown salads, ditching hidden carbs, and eating in tune with the seasons, Andrew lost over 84 pounds in weight and reversed his diabetes.
“People I’ve not seen for quite a long time look at me and say, ‘You’ve lost loads of weight. How have you done it? What’s your secret?’ But there’s literally no secret to it. It’s just we’re not talking about it. And we’re not talking about the carbohydrates hidden in our food.”
Checking out carbohydrate levels in supermarket food became a daily routine, Andrew adds.
“It became a weird kind of game between me and my wife, Carol, when we were in the supermarket, shouting at each other across the aisle, ‘Do you know how much carbohydrate is in this? We used to eat this by the ton!’ So we ditched things like white bread, white pasta, and rice, and we started to go for wholemeal choices.
“I noticed the more weight I lost, the more I could do in the garden. The more energy I had to do little projects, the more the garden started to change and develop. And the more I did, the more weight I lost, and the more I started to grow. So I became the king of salads and growing lettuces.”
Planning for the future
But Andrew’s story isn’t just about food. It’s also about how gardening reshapes lives over time. His current, quarter-acre plot, perched 1,300 feet above sea level, is now a landscape of vegetable beds and a developing food forest, planned with future years in mind.
The latter of these, planned for the top of the hill to act simultaneously as windbreak, wildlife habitat and low-effort productive space, is a key part of his future-proofed plan.
“I said to someone recently, ‘There’s going to be a day when I’ll get too old and I won’t be able to garden. And they said, ‘Well, what are you going to do with your garden then?’ And I said, ‘well, do you see the food forest I’m going to plant at the top?’.”
Accessibility is a constant theme in Andrew’s approach. After his spinal injury, he learned to garden from a wheeled seat, working in raised beds and containers he could reach. That experience shaped his philosophy: build gardens that adapt, that welcome difference, and that don’t rely on brute strength. “You have to deal with what you’re given, and the garden that you’re given,” he says. “You have to listen to it, and adapt to it.”
Now, he wants more people to benefit from gardening and build their connections with nature. “You meet lots of beautiful, wonderful people in gardening. They are the kindest community in this world. I think if we had a little bit more of that in all levels of our society, we’d be a great nation. We’d be absolutely wonderful – nothing could stop us.”
PHOTOS: Alun Callender; Jason Ingram; Getty
