The entertaining and practical pieces which make up Better Against a Wall are selected from the best of Ursula Buchan's journalism from the past fifteen years and demonstrate her highly individual take on gardening and modern gardeners. Politics, practicalities and personalities of the gardening world all find a place in this collection, alongside flowers, garden design, ecological friends and foes. She shivers at the thought of grass snakes, warms to the soft perfection of Shirley Poppies, hunts for plants in Nepal, fails to master machinery, pulls a fast one with climbers and somehow manages to give seaweed a good press.