Clare Hastings Author

Clare Hastings started her career in the fashion department of Harpers & Queen magazine, before leaving to work freelance as a stylist and later as a costume designer. Thirty years later, Clare changed direction to work alongside her daughter Calypso, in The Indytute. Clare and her partner, Nick, move between the Berkshire cottage and a flat in London, where they continue to get their garden fix by humping soil and plants five floors up on to the roof.

Osbert Lancaster (1908-96) was a painter, a writer, a cartoonist and humorist. When he married Anne-Scott James in 1967 he found in gardens a whole new subject for his witty pen - and in his stepdaughter, Clare, a new model for his drawings.