He was also physically fit, and worked from morning till night, gardening and digging holes right up to his arrest, so we think he would have been able to bury bodies so that they wouldn't have been discovered".
So what, you may well ask, is this scaled-down version of 30s life doing in the gardening pages?
But even then the medical advice was to try to do something active: a short walk, gentle gardening.
After planting some carrots on the street outside his house, LA resident Ron Finley helped kickstart a guerrilla gardening movement that has now resulted in the city passing a new law to allow free gardens next to sidewalks so communities can grow their own food.
Through the dissolution of a suburban marriage - by way of boredom, lovelessness and the fact that, when the wife's pruning shears match her gardening gloves, it is no accident - the film suggests there is beauty next to you, that you can reach out and touch it, that people are not what they seem and that everyone's life is infinitely more interesting than they think it is.
Moody hunk André le Nôtre (Matthias Schoenaerts) interviews a bunch of wigs for a gardening job at Versailles.
I tell him Beresford has been raving to me about his beautiful garden – Mike teaches gardening to beginners, trained at Kew, has been doing it all his life, even during the miners' strike.
It is about to start its own market-gardening company, which will grow and sell vegetables across the borough and north London – just like the Lea Valley used to do.
See the way the handle on those pruning shears matches her gardening clogs?
"We'd head out in a van with gardening tools, dark clothes, some cash and no ID".
Edible Eastside is an urban garden project in Digbeth combining gardening and art; its monthly First Friday event hosts a mini food fair and outdoor film screenings.
