This Allotment: Stories of Growing, Eating and Nurturing
By: Sarah Rigby
‘A celebration of community, belonging, intimacy, healing, reclamation, connection, growth, grief, birth, and joy’ Victoria Bennett, author of All My Wild Mothers
This Allotment brings together thirteen brilliant contemporary writers in a glorious celebration of these entirely unique spaces: plots that mean so much more than the soil upon which they sit.
An allotment. A health-giving, heart-filling miniature kingdom of carrots, courgettes and callaloo. A microcosm for our societies at large as people claim their ‘patch’ and guard it protectively, but also of welcoming arms, gifted gluts and new recipes from overseas.
They are places of blowsy dahlias, cricket on the radio and cups of tea in tumbledown sheds; they are buzzing bees and the wisdom of weeds and seeds; they are resilience, resistance and freedom with a radical history and future. All life is here is this collection of vibrant original pieces on growing, eating and nurturing.
CONTRIBUTORS: Jenny Chamarette * Rob Cowen * Marchelle Farrell * Olia Hercules * David Keenan & Heather Leigh * Kirsteen McNish * JC Niala * Graeme Rigby * Rebecca Schiller * Sui Searle * Sara Venn * Alice Vincent
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‘In this bounteous anthology, each vignette of allotment life is jewel-bright and tempting, like a plump beetroot pulled up from yielding earth or a handful of damp rhubarb stalks, shimmer-pink and glowing. On turning the book’s haunting final page, I could almost feel sun on my face and dirt beneath my fingernails.’
- Laura Pashby, author of Chasing Fog -
‘This is a celebration of community, belonging, intimacy, healing, reclamation, connection, growth, grief, birth, and joy and reminds us that sometimes, oftentimes, the simple act of planting a seed in the soil is enough for hope to grow.’
- Victoria Bennett, author of All My Wild Mothers