AS someone who has lived in more than 40 different homes, I find one question bothering me just at present.

Where would I like to finally settle down before vacating my space on planet Earth?

Of course there are a number of impossible options coursing through my mind. A house in the delightful Bohemian community of Saulsalito across the bay from San Francisco, a French town house nestling in the foothills of the Pyrenees or a penthouse flat in central London looking down on the Thames all figure in the equation.

Unless I win the lottery – tricky as I’ve never bought a ticket – they are all consigned to the stuff of dreams, but the question is important. Do you really want to spend your remaining days in a house that is difficult to look after and with a garden demanding constant attention?

Indeed the garden question is quite significant, because all that mowing, weeding, planting and pruning can become quite a burden as the years advance.

Interesting then that Government forecasts – leaked last week – reveal that more than two million homes will not have a garden of any sort by next year. A report says that 2.16m homes will be without a private garden compared with 1.6m in 1995. And the figure will continue to rocket in coming years.

The report from the Department for the Environment, Fisheries and Rural Affairs blames the rise in ‘gardenless households’ – their clumsy phrase, not mine – on developers building more single occupancy and retirement flats. You only have to drive from one end of Beaconsfield New Town to the other to see how many grand homes have been flattened there to make way for such developments.

Of course there will always be houses with bits of land to dig up and plant. The English country garden is woven irrevocably into our fabric. We like our gardens with their stripy lawns, geraniums, petunias, begonias and, of course, giant Leylandii hedges to annoy our neighbours.

There’s nothing more guaranteed to grab our attention than headlines about neighbours being at war over bits of garden and hedging. ‘Never mind the economy, the fighting in Afghanistan and poverty in Africa – have you seen about that swine who took a chainsaw to his neighbour’s rhododendron?’ Of course it’s all going to change further down the line. The Climate Doomsayers have warned us. France and Spain are going to become extensions of the Sahara desert and the UK will be basking in a Mediterranean climate. It will turn our lawns and begonias into sad shrivelled brown things.

Anyway we at Mortimer Towers are ahead of the game. We’ve got rid of most of the lawns, have gravelled pathways, rocks and glorious beds full of Mediterranean style shrubs and plants. We even have an olive tree and it all survived that last horrible winter.

Gardening is, of course, an odd little hobby when you think about it on a grander scale. We spend our days toiling away over a patch of green that when measured against the scale of the whole planet it is not even a speck of dust. Still it keeps some of us out of mischief.

Whether the up and coming generations will have the same interest in toiling away on the soil remains to be seen, but I rather suspect they’ll go for the option of easy maintenance.

So in reality we don’t really need to get too upset over the growing number of homes without gardens, indeed the demand for them is likely to grow given that a few years down the line there will be as many retired people in this country as those working.

As for me, well the options are still open, but one thing’s for certain. In the not too distant future I will be too old to garden with any serious intent and anyway it will be too flaming hot.