I’m having a cup of tea in Arthur Parkinson’s grandma Sheila’s bungalow in suburban Hucknall, Nottinghamshire, and there’s a hen in here. She’s terribly chic: a lovely cream and grey girl with a feather crest and a floppy comb like an avant-garde fascinator Isabella Blow might have worn. This is Linda the legbar (named for Kate Moss’s mum; Moss is a neighbour of Parkinson’s in the Cotswolds). We watch her potter around, occasionally pecking at some crumbs on a plate by the fire. “She’s had a Hobnob,” says Arthur. “She’s beautiful,” says Sheila, entirely unfazed. She’s used to Arthur bringing hens round – he’s been doing it since he was tiny. Linda wanders over, appraises the arm of the sofa, then jumps up on to it and lies down next to me, clucking gently.
Parkinson, 30, is best known as a gardener and writer; he’s the author of two books, The Pottery Garden and The Flower Yard, and his hugely popular Instagram (@arthurparkinson, 108,000 followers) is crammed with exquisite, pollinator-friendly blooms. But Linda represents his first love – hens – and that’s what we’re here to talk about. His new book, Chicken Boy, is part memoir (henoir?), part how-to guide to chicken-keeping, but above all, a love letter to these misunderstood creatures – not “disgusting and pecky” or just “Sunday dinner”, but charming, worthy of respect and above all, beautiful.
This life-long love affair started when Parkinson was a toddler and discovered a neighbour’s hens on a nearby allotment; a few years later his father built “the first of many hen houses” for his own first flock. Childhood seems to have been a mixed bag: the book conjures an idyllically close family life (“like Coronation Street”, he jokes), with both grandmothers – Sheila and Min, of whom more later – round the corner, his mum filling their cottage and garden with beauty, a younger brother, Lyndon, he writes of with great affection and his dad helping with the practical stuff. But school was hard.
“I wasn’t academic at all and that caused huge pressure: I didn’t learn to write, couldn’t tell the time, couldn’t tie my shoelaces… The only time I felt confident was at Min’s, gardening.” He learned to read, eventually, from The Backyard Poultry Book. His parents split up when he was 11 years old: Chicken Boy skates over the detail, but there’s a palpable sadness. He struggled, too, with the depression that still affects him now. He describes in the book how he was often found by his parents and grandparents hiding in the henhouse in the depths of it. “I think that’s why I became attached to Min in particular,” he says. “She’d had to cope with my grandad who had shellshock and she would be, not unkind, but, ‘The hedge needs cutting today, come on!’”
Another older woman was hugely influential at this time in his life, improbably: Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire, Mitford sister and famous hen fancier. He fell in love with the Chatsworth estate, where the Duchess kept flocks of free-roaming hens, selling the eggs in the shop. On visits, he’d disappear to hide in the elegant, airy henhouses. Encouraged by his grandfather, Parkinson wrote her a letter about hens; Debo replied and it was the start of a lifelong poultry-based correspondence. “She took time. It’s lovely getting a letter, isn’t it?” There’s a sweet story in the book about the first time they met in person just after his parents split up, a surprise arranged by his mum, and how Debo took him to collect eggs. One day, he’d love, he says, “to produce a gorgeous film about Debo and how she built Chatsworth and the farm shop”.
Parkinson left school at 16, working in retail jobs while he trained as a gardener, first at nearby Brackenhurst, then at Kew. He hated London. “Basically what took the place of chickens was a lot of sex and drugs,” he laughs. He would be outside London Zoo every weekend at opening time, hungry for a touch of wildness and nature in his life. Salvation came with a housesitting gig, then a job for garden guru Sarah Raven at Perch Hill in Suffolk. They still collaborate; he seems to collect like-minded ladies in his life. “Being gay, you do fall for women,” he says.
A position as head gardener at the Emma Bridgewater pottery factory in Stoke-on-Trent followed, where he created a gorgeous garden and filled it with hens. “I loved it because I felt I was doing Deborah Devonshire,” he says – combining high-end retail and natural beauty (he got “bollocked” though, he says, for keeping ducklings on the shop floor). It’s an idea he comes back to again and again as we talk at Sheila’s kitchen table, Linda perched on his knee; he’d like his own shop one day selling eggs from “garden-adored hens” as it says on the hand-drawn box of multicoloured beauties he very sweetly gives me as a gift. He wrote The Pottery Garden at Bridgewater, but came back to Hucknall, partly because “there’s no money in gardening” and partly because Min was starting to struggle with dementia. “I was coming back to visual signs that she wasn’t being looked after. Her face hadn’t been washed; it wasn’t good enough.”
He moved in with Min and looked after her through lockdown. “I had such a strong bond with my nana from childhood, I couldn’t see her be not cared for.” He’s passionate about how overstretched the care sector is, recalling long ambulance waits and carers unable to reach his grandmother before 11 in the morning after she’d been put to bed at six the previous night. Looking after a 94-year-old with dementia, persuading her to shower, feeding her and changing her sheets can’t have been easy. He says it was hard at night, especially, and he could only nip out when Min was asleep. But “My grandma was beautiful and I wanted to keep her beautiful,” he says. “It’s like having a beautiful hen, that’s how I got through it.”
For all the difficulty, he recalls it as a magical time. “Loved it,” he says. “Bliss. It was a time of just not having to see people. It was that gorgeous spring…” He ordered fertile rare-breed eggs on eBay constantly: “I hatched so many chickens.” He documented it idyllically on Instagram: his grandmother in her pearls smiling in the sunny garden, surrounded by happy hens, or chicks wandering through the long grass. Min’s beloved garden went ecstatically wild as she declined: “All the herbs self-seeded and it just became a lovely wild flower meadow; you wouldn’t have been able to design a Chelsea garden to look that romantic.”
Instagram and his unerring eye for beauty – he loves doing his own photography – gradually became a business and a living in its own right over this time. His account is esoteric and outspoken – “bonkers” he says – mixing flowers and hens with petitions on pesticide use and angry posts about the state of the natural world, but also frequent clips from Absolutely Fabulous. He’s been obsessed with Joanna Lumley since joining the animal welfare organisation Viva aged six and receiving a copy of their magazine featuring “this very gorgeous woman holding a piglet”. He shies away from traditional influencer fodder – what he calls, “Good morning, everybody!” videos – and from over-emphasising the mental health benefits of gardening. Living with depression, he knows, “You need a bit more than that.”
Somehow this idiosyncratic blend works. “A lot of people say to me, ‘Isn’t it a shame you’re not on Gardeners’ World?’ – I don’t actually need to be now,” he says (though he has made several guest appearances, including a lockdown one from Min’s garden). “I’ve got such an engaged, lovely audience.” They’re a mix of mainly middle-aged ladies who like beautiful flowers and hens and some admirers of his own beauty: former Vogue editor Alexandra Shulman described him as a “pin-up” last year. How did that feel? “Amazing. It’s very nice being compared to Harry Styles, but I don’t think I deserve it, really.” He’s becoming quite famous, though; people have started to recognise him on the train. Mostly they’re “really nice” but he has a few over-enthusiastic male admirers of whom, he says, he thinks, “My God, please don’t turn up behind my dustbin. If you do, you’ll see a very feisty Patsy Stone!” (Lumley’s Ab Fab alter-ego).
It’s funny that Parkinson has become an influencer – henfluencer even – because he’s quite old-fashioned in a way; someone who might have been happier if he had been born 100 years ago. He agrees. “I was born with an old head. I’d have been very happy as a Georgian Marie-Antoinette!” More seriously, he feels “All the things I love were more accessible to everybody back then.” That includes a closer relationship to our food, the seasons and the natural world: an outspoken critic of most things the government does, he thinks Thérèse Coffey was right about turnips and he’d like it if everyone could grow their own food and keep hens. But “I’m real, I’m not going into the Daylesford farm shop [the Cotswolds equivalent of Petit Trianon] to do my shopping; I have to go to Tesco.” He finds the state of the poultry industry – as well as much of the rest of the world – “scary” and has posted about how the current bird flu crisis is the result of our insistence on cheap eggs. He’s an enthusiastic supporter of the few who do keep hens humanely, singling out Cacklebean Eggs, another Cotswolds neighbour, for praise.
“Making chickens look beautiful is my job, in a way,” he says. It’s a job he takes very seriously: Chicken Boy is a paean to feathery beauty, filled with his charming drawings of rare breed hens which he scoured the country to find, even though he was struggling with a bout of depression. He’s desperate for us all to understand how gorgeous hens can be. Are there particularly memorable chicks in his life? There’s Claudia, a Pekin bantam he was asked to take in by a local family who were keeping her on her own with the pugs they bred. “What was so sweet was the way she arrived – she was carried by a little boy out of a cardboard box and I suddenly felt very adult.” Claudia has travelled across the country with him in a wicker picnic basket: she’s appeared on Gardeners’ World and on Radio 2 with Zoe Ball. “She’s such a happy personality for a hen, she’s like a pug.” Linda, contentedly dozing on his lap as he strokes her, is another. She was the sole survivor of a dog or fox attack as a chick and hand-reared in the elegant Cotswold cottage Parkinson was then sharing with his now more-off-than-on partner, interior designer James Mackie. Mackie had not grown up with hens, but “absolutely loved Linda”, and misses her now she’s moved up to live with the Hucknall flock in Min’s garden.
He talks wistfully about the “paradise time” when he and Mackie were first living together: “I was so happy I started drawing again.” It was strange, he says (and must have been hard, I think), how “My first home and first relationship have been quite public.” (They featured in House & Garden and made a very chic Insta couple.) Now he’s caught between that glitzy Cotswolds life and this childhood cocoon, which he’s conscious is “going extinct”. Min died in 2021; his parents are still nearby, but he worries for Sheila. “It’s like having a candle… I think that’s why I’m at a strange time in my life. I’m living in childhood still.” Childhood was “the happiest I’ve been and I’m very aware of that. I think the only way I’m going to capture that in adult life is having hens and gardens. They’ve been a sanctuary since I was little.”
It’s time for Linda to go back in the picnic basket and head home. Parkinson, in contrast, doesn’t really have one now. It’s a shame, because if ever a 30-year-old needed a home, it’s him. He describes himself as “reclusive”, he hates going on holiday and is at his happiest when he’s just made the henhouse lovely for his beautiful girls. He’s pining for a place to indulge his desire, “To spend all my money on bare-root roses and apple trees. I’m very sure what I want out of this life,” he says. He hasn’t quite got it all yet; I hope it happens soon. But in the meantime, there are always hens.
Chicken Boy: My Life With Hens by Arthur Parkinson is published by Particular at £22. Buy it for £19.36 at guardianbookshop.com
