How nature healed me. Caroline Quentin reveals she took Prozac for years and tried therapy to deal childhood trauma - but it was her passion for gardening that finally helped her blossom

Caroline Quentin, 63, reveals her early life in new book Drawn To The Garden READ MORE:  Caroline Quentin, 63, joins lookalike daughter Rose, 24, to discuss their new project as she shares some advice for Strictly Come Dancing stars

When Caroline Quentin was a little girl and her mother Katie was taken away for another spell in psychiatric care, she would hide under a gnarly old apple tree. She was lonely and frightened and, rather than seeking shelter in the home that was the scene of so much familial hurt, she sought it in nature.

She would curl up and cry in a tangle of plants for which she then had no name. Today, a flamboyant and technically skilled gardener, she’d identify them in a heartbeat.

She remembers feeling ashamed of her mother and ashamed of herself for feeling that way. Yet she also remembers the sun spilling down, drying her tears and germinating something inside of her. Hope, perhaps.

Caroline would go on to be one of Britain’s most popular actresses. Dorothy in Men Behaving Badly. Maddie Magellan in Jonathan Creek. Kate Salinger in Kiss Me Kate and Wes in The Lazarus Project.

She’s been in everything from Bridgerton to Doc Martin too, hoofed on Strictly Come Dancing, sung in Les Mis and performed on stage with the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Caroline Quentin, 63, is one of Britain’s most popular actresses. She’s famous for playing Dorothy in Men Behaving Badly, Maddie Magellan in Jonathan Creek, Kate Salinger in Kiss Me Kate and Wes in The Lazarus Project

Now 63, she’s more or less cornered the market in indomitable women. Which makes the story of the little girl and the apple tree stunningly unexpected.

She tells it at the opening of her new book, her first ever, which isn’t a showbiz memoir but a how-to book about gardening. It’s the result of a lifetime of trying to mend a broken heart by growing fruit, vegetables and flowers.

Caroline has sown herself into its pages in the memories, recipes, anecdotes and even the illustrations, for yes, she also draws and paints to a professional standard.

It’s an utter joy – and also a two-(green) fingered salute to all the experts who claim gardening is ‘daunting and difficult and could only be done by old men in roll-neck sweaters, who’d been to horticultural college and learned the dark arts of double digging’.

Plus you get a self-portrait of Caroline’s bare bottom, round as a ripe squash, beneath the apron she wears ‘to keep the mud off my front’ along with shortie wellies and a straw fedora. ‘Naked gardening, first thing on a summer’s morning,’ she sighs. ‘It’s the best.’

But the story starts in another garden, the one in Surrey where she’d take refuge as a child.

‘They used to call it manic depression. Today we’d say it was bipolar disorder. My mother was treated with electroconvulsive therapy and liberal amounts of medication. It was unnerving. A lot of my early life was spent afraid and lonely.

‘I remember very early on, the open spaces were where I’d run to look for safety. Where the trauma is indoors, you go outdoors. Even as a child I had a sense that outdoors would be the bigger picture for me.

‘Nature still brings me comfort, more than anything. I watch a bird and feel at peace. I plant a seed and take refuge in the act. That began aged five.

‘Who I am is constructed from those years, the good and the bad. What I do when I’m working is very much a persona. We’re all the product of our upbringing.

‘If we’ve been lucky enough to have a family and unlucky enough to have a family with trauma, like most families [here her wonderfully mobile face and upturned palms silently ask, “Well, what can you do?”], we pay the price for that in some way.’

In Drawn To The Garden, she reveals a little of this early life: the Christmas when her mum Katie, a single mother, manically decorated the tree with kindling and filled the fireplace with baubles; the bleak depressions that left her bedridden and unable to even speak to her small daughter.

Caroline reveals something of her early life in her new how-to gardening book, Drawn To The Garden

There were multiple overdoses and stretches in secure wards, during which Caroline would be taken to visit. Tellingly, what she remembers most vividly are the marguerites growing in the hospital garden.

She’s now having weekly therapy after a false start a few years ago, and she loves it, because it makes her laugh.

‘I didn’t expect that about therapy, that you could actually laugh about the stuff that makes you cry, too. I really like that. It’s immensely comforting.

‘I’d known for about 50 years I needed help but I was scared of what I might find.’ She says there was no one big life event that made her pick up the phone. ‘It just became very tiring being me.’

In her book she refers to using ‘numbing agents’ and I wonder if she means drink, drugs or unwise sex long ago, but she says it was the antidepressant Prozac. She took it for four years but her creativity flatlined, and she chose to come off it.

‘I just couldn’t create with it and I also felt I wasn’t dealing with the problem at the heart of it, I was simply masking it. I’m not going to start saying what people should and shouldn’t take, I want no responsibility for that, I’m just saying it didn’t suit me.’

Given her upbringing, I wonder what kind of mother she is to her own children Rose, 24, an actress, and Will, 20, a student. ‘Close! I’m very close to my children,’ she says instantly, and you get the impression that being involved and steadfast matters very much to her.

‘Because my childhood was chaotic I used to panic when things weren’t going well for them. I’d freak out but they’d look at me and go, “It’s fine, Mum. It’s fine. I’m seven, but it’s fine.” That’s made us who we are together.’

She was never the stay-at-home parent though; that was her husband Sam Farmer’s role. Eleven years her junior, he was a runner on Men Behaving Badly who asked Caroline out within days of meeting her – in front of her co-stars Martin Clunes and Neil Morrissey.

‘You’ve got b***s of steel,’ she recalls Morrissey telling him at the time. As for Clunes, he’s still a dear friend, who visits them regularly for Sunday lunch with his wife Philippa.

‘It was love at first sight for Sam and I, 25 years ago, nearly,’ she says. ‘He’s very, very handsome but he’s a good person too. He’s right for me. I couldn’t have done any of it without him.

‘With almost any other man I’d have had to stop work. For a man to put his ego to one side and let his wife take centre stage and go out and earn the money, it’s a big thing.

A self-portrait of Caroline in her new book, Drawn To The Garden, which includes memories, anecdotes and recipes as well as illustrations

‘People used to look at us like we were weird, like I was leading some alien life, but it made sense for us and we’re lucky we managed to grow together.

‘Anyway, he was very generous with me and I’m returning it a bit now.’ (Sam later trained as a cosmetic scientist and has created a line of skincare for teenagers.)

According to Drawn To The Garden, the only thing they seem to fight over is beetroot, since Caroline is pro and Sam is anti. In the section on birdlife she says, ‘Like Sam Farmer, blackbirds are monogamous, choosing a partner until death do they part.’

The accompanying watercolour is of a glossily handsome male blackbird with a prize berry in its beak. It’s pretty much her favourite of the book’s 70 major illustrations.

Caroline was born in Surrey, the fourth of four sisters and the youngest by almost a decade. Her father was a pilot whose long absences from home ended in her parents’ divorce and a cool relationship with his youngest daughter.

As for her mother, their relationship flourished once modern medication stabilised her mental health. She died over a decade ago and in memory of her red-headed beauty, Caroline planted a bright red border of the shrub Midwinter Fire, and an apple tree called Katy whose small, red, sweet fruits remind her of the very best of her mum.

Despite the difficulties in her home life, Caroline won a place at a performing arts school in Hertfordshire. She was a gifted dancer, harbouring dreams of ballet, but her tricky family circumstances meant that she had to leave and was earning her living dancing in an end-of-the-pier show by the age of 16.

Men Behaving Badly made her a household name in the late 90s since she appeared in every one of the show’s 42 episodes drawing audiences of 15 million or more. She was married to the comedian Paul Merton at the time. They divorced in 1998.

Caroline pictured with her husband Sam Farmer. The pair met on the set of Men Behaving Badly, where Sam was a runner. He asked Caroline out within days of meeting her

Then came that coup de foudre with Sam, and Caroline was pregnant within months. The family eventually settled in Devon where she built the garden she first revealed to the world on Instagram in lockdown and that’s now the subject of her book. A sequel seems likely, and she’s also writing a novel set in nature.

Drawn To The Garden describes the growing tension between the quieter, private Caroline and the show-off (her words) on stage and screen. It suggests she fancies gardening as a second career. Is that true?

‘Yeah, definitely. I’ve done it for a long time, showbusiness. I started at 16. It’s not that I don’t love it. I do, still.

‘But I reckon if things go well for me I’ll be able to take a bit of a backseat and do more gardening, more drawing, more painting, more writing, all those things where I get to spend five days a week pretty much on my own, hanging out with Sam in the sun. I like that.’

That said, she has two potential terrestrial TV jobs lined up, which will keep her ticking over for years.

‘I’m back in demand,’ she says. ‘I was told that after 40 work dries up, and it’s true I had to work hard to earn a living.

‘In my fifties I had two years out of it altogether. Then when I turned 60 it came back. Was it my age, or what’s fashionable on telly? Was I just not in fashion?

‘If what’s being made are things about teenage werewolves then I’m not that person, am I?’

She’s happy about getting older and wishes more people felt the same. They would if they looked to nature, she thinks.

‘When you’re in nature, whether in your garden or the woods, things that are in decline or decaying may look different but are no less beautiful.

‘Our attitude to ageing in the West is terrifying because it’s now unacceptable to be old. We’ve lost respect for the accompanying wisdom, experience and fragility.’

Right now, she’s passing through London after a break in America and can’t wait to get back to Devon. Tonight she’s planning to get a bag of her own tomatoes, hard as billiard balls, out of the freezer and make them into a passata.

She’ll also be using her own garlic which she grows, picks, plaits and hangs in her kitchen. For her they symbolise home, family and certainty as much as dinner.

That’s why she insists on an abundance in the garden. Lots of things flourish there. Most of all her.