This Allotment E-Book

• Herausgeber: Elliott & Thompson
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 222

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

'A celebration of community, belonging, intimacy, healing, reclamation, connection, growth, grief, birth, and joy' Victoria Bennett, author of All My Wild Mothers 'Dip into these pages as an allotment sceptic and you may well find your mind is changed. If you have a plot, you'll be reminded of why all the hard work is worthwhile.' The Garden 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

Leseprobe

THIS ALLOTMENT

CONTENTS

A Beginning

Sarah Rigby

Fail, Repeat, Begin Again

Kirsteen McNish

Soil and Song

Olia Hercules

Of Circular Time and Vegetables

David Keenan and Heather Leigh

Uncertain Ground

Marchelle Farrell

Land Is the Work of Many Hands

Jenny Chamarette

Allotments Are Anomalies

Rebecca Schiller

Old Boys and Hidden Women

JC Niala

Space to Grow: Women and Allotments

Alice Vincent

Cultivating Community

Sui Searle

Peaceable Kingdoms

Graeme Rigby

From Sweet Peas to Politics

Sara Venn

This Allotment

Rob Cowen

About the Contributors

About the Editor

A BEGINNING

Sarah Rigby

‘Where did it begin?’ somebody asked me recently. ‘This love of gardening, this allotment, where did it start?’ I found it hard to answer. It’s an urge that takes so many of us – to grow, to tend – but an allotment holds a unique allure, a quality all of its own. It’s different to the connection I have to my frost-cracked pots at home, or to the community project where knees meet soil alongside professional growers and other volunteers. I realised then that I wanted to understand this feeling better, through the eyes and the hands of other allotmenteers with their own relationships with these places – and the idea for this book began to grow. Through their writing, perhaps I might catch hold of an answer to that question of where this all began for me.

Was it my sister with her own allotment that sparked this urge? Was it when a friend asked me if I wanted to try to grow something on the back of a neighbour’s patch when our children were still small? Or during lockdown when the school’s plot suddenly became wild, available, in need of tending through those months of hard and difficult things that felt like stones rather than seeds in my pockets. Was it the smell of my grandmother’s tomato plants in her front porch, never used as an entrance but only to offer those tangy fruits light and warmth? Maybe it was the apples, peaches and damsonsthought-to-be-plums in my parents’ garden, which each year provided a new flush of slightly bruised produce to sit on the drainer ready for coring, stewing, freezing. Or even further back? An ancestor, perhaps, with a tiny cottage garden on a Danish fjord growing leeks and herbs or on a Scottish hillside digging hard-won potatoes.

This question of beginnings – of where it all started – is something that comes up time and again in this collection, and it’s the grandmothers, it seems, who frequently plant the first seed: for Kirsteen McNish in her grandmother’s greenhouse; for Marchelle Farrell in her grandmother’s burgeoning garden in Trinidad; for Olia Hercules in her grandmother’s Ukrainian smallholding full of flowers. Yet you’ll find the allotment ‘old boys’ here too, no fear: in care-filled nostalgic conversations with historian JC Niala; in the ‘peaceable kingdoms’ of Newcastle’s allotment gardens recorded by Graeme Rigby, and in their stern-but-kind (or sometimes just downright stern) guidance for newcomers.

Wherever it began for me, this allotment, on which I sit making voice notes in September 2023 having recently commissioned these pieces, has bits of me tied into it now. There is, as Jenny Chamarette explores in ‘Land Is the Work of Many Hands’, an intimacy in coming to know a place. There’s no letting it go. As for so many of the contributors you’ll find here, I’m not sure I could make the break, even if I wanted to. Because allotments get under our skin. With splinters from woodchip and thorns from brambles, with compost under our nails and streaks of mud across our forehead for the walk home. Once we’re hooked, they are places to which we cannot help but return, sometimes in challenging circumstances as in Rebecca Schiller’s piece, ‘Allotments Are Anomalies’, sometimes because – as Sara Venn describes – they have become such a fundamental part of who we are.

I’m cutting back tomato plants as summer ends. For the first time, there’s a chill in the air this morning that says the sun might be shining today but autumn is very much on the horizon. I’m picking a few final fruits too. Blight is taking parts of them now, but after hundreds and hundreds of yellow-red pops of acidic sweetness, is it any wonder these plants are ailing and that the soil needs mulching? There are spiders everywhere on the plot, weaving their webs, building their own places of sustenance and shelter among the yellowing fennel fronds. Yet, as the grasshoppers chirrup, perhaps for the last day this year, this place whispers that a new growing season is not far away. This time will come again. The beginnings of it are already here.

As we’ll see in David Keenan and Heather Leigh’s beautiful conversation, there is a sense of time unfurling at different speeds on an allotment. Ten frozen-handed minutes becoming a morning-long winter woodchipping session. Long, languid summer afternoons turning into evenings that hang in the balance. Of circular time, where the rituals of a new growing season come back around each year – the seed sorting, seed compost and seed trays (toilet rolls for sweet peas); the planting out, the covering with fleece or net; the building of pea frames as hawthorn blossom appears, the dismantling of tiedcane wigwams before the storms. And so the year turns.

In the distance, I can hear children playing in the park over the hedge, parakeets screaming across the marshes, distant aeroplanes buzzing. Allotments are so often places that are set apart, on the edges of a town or village, a railway, a road. They are vulnerable, their existence frequently threatened, as we’ll see. Yet these places mean so much more than the courgettes, the marigolds and the tumble-down structures that some might imagine could just be picked up and relocated, grown again elsewhere. They are full of life. Community, yes, as we’ll hear in Alice Vincent’s ‘Space to Grow: Women and Allotments’.

But also rocket flowers buzzing with bees, shield bugs in the raspberries, fungi and microbes and roots working in symbiosis – ongoing ‘frenzies of birth and death’, in the words of Rob Cowen, that make allotments some of the most ecologically diverse places in the country.

We are, as Sui Searle underlines, ‘intimately interdependent’. We rely on these many interconnected relationships for our survival, for our joy, for our sense of ourselves. For in the blackcurrant bushes already producing leaf buds for next year, the tender new chard waving in a slight breeze, the ants nesting in the compost bin, the dock emerging from the bed again, the smell of a ripening tomato for a kitchen table, in all these things, we find a sense of home. Because the land welcomes us back. There is always a new beginning to be found here – a sense of something half forgotten pushing back through if given half a chance.

September 2023, February 2024

FAIL, REPEAT,BEGIN AGAIN

Kirsteen McNish

My first hazy memories of seeing produce grow are down to my maternal grandmother. She lived in a post-First World War house in Nottingham, a typical semi-detached on an estate cul-de-sac, with a front and back garden and an outside loo. My grandma was a petite, twinkly-eyed woman, who would laugh a lot; warm and quick-witted. I remember her almost always with her half-pinny on, cooking from scratch, retrieving things from a small larder. She was very house-proud, scrubbed her step and swept every day, but prouder still of her garden, graced with a greenhouse and a stubbly grey concrete path leading to a vegetable plot.

In the hazy recollections of childhood, my sister Rachael and I would create dance routines in that garden, pretending to be on Top of the Pops and bickering about who did the steps best. In the amber glow of the early eighties, we would stay there for a couple of weeks each summer with her and my two youngest aunts. My grandmother would do handstands against the stippled rendered wall with Rachael and me, and in the evenings we would watch Tales of the Unexpected. Lights off, she would dance in front of the fire, mimicking the silhouetted dancer of the show’s opening credits, making us collapse in giggles until the programme got too frightening, and we were hurried off to bed with the hallway light on, whispering to each other in the dark.

In the daytime, however, it was this glass house of Grandma’s that entranced me. Sneaking in, the sharp fresh smell of tomatoes turning from green to red and warming under glass, mingled with the almost sickly sweet smell of earth nestling cheek-by-jowl with crescent-moon, bumpyskinned, odd-shaped cucumbers. Here was twine to run between my fingers and make cat’s cradles, mucky gloves to wear like Frankenstein’s monster as I chased my sister, a leaky iron watering can with tape on the handle, tins with the labels taken off holding emerging seedlings. I would shower the watering can back and forth over the vines, making the smell headier – breathing it in deeply.

In the late afternoons, we would kneel on chairs in the kitchen shelling peas while Grandma sliced potatoes and runner beans that smelt as fresh as newly cut grass. This garden was also where my mum had played as a child, and looked after her younger siblings when she wasn’t doing chores, and when we visited they would murmur the flowers’ nicknames together as they walked around the garden before we set off for home in Corby – a place she never settled. Busy lizzie, forget-me-not, baby’s breath, love-in-a-mist and bleeding hearts; the words comforted and soothed her. It was up behind the greenhouse, however, that felt like a Narnia of sorts to me. Obelisks of sticks with climbing runner beans with scarlet hermaphroditic flowers, sweet peas, garden peas, lettuce, cabbage, cucumbers and nasturtiums. The remaining details have evaporated into the vagaries of time, but I remember running to this patch in the rain once, so pleased to have been sent out for something for dinner and with the special responsibility. When I asked my father recently how big the garden was, he told me it was half the size it held in my imagination – such was its dearly held part of my youth.

My mother inherited a love of growing from seed from my grandmother. We would often see her, creative at her core, building cold frames and a makeshift greenhouse of sorts from offcuts of wood and cheap plastic sheets. Pinch pots were made from compressed newspaper (almost nothing was wasted). She was ultra-resourceful but in an age of the heady spread of supermarkets, she never branched out into vegetable or allotment patches. And with eight active children, footballs, bikes and second-hand tennis rackets, she perhaps thought better of growing things that could be so easily, if unintentionally, destroyed. Like my grandmother, as she worked she wore an apron, which once held a tiny, almost hairless abandoned kitten, nursing it back to health against the warmth of her chest. Planting out seeds, her tongue tip always curled up to her top lip in concentration. With a locked-away basket of tough memories and present-day worries, her garden was her respite and escape from pain and worry. We weren’t encouraged to get involved. To grow and nurture quiet things was a place of survival in a life that hadn’t always given her an easy ride.

Not long before she died, my mum had a nasty fall in the garden. My dad was impervious to her calls, listening to football on the radio as she lay for at least an hour in the dewy grass. I imagine that to feel so vulnerable in the place she loved best, and where so many of her strengths had played out, must have been a heavy blow. In the last weeks before she died, she asked every day to be taken to the window to see her rose bush – in the wheelchair she resented suddenly having to use. I have seen the garden she created only once since, but the neat, organised rows in her shed and the cold frames leaning against the back of the house remain still, legacy pieces of her toil.

*

My first flirtation with growing and allotments comes in my early twenties, shortly after graduating. I’m living in Hull in a flat whose road is wide and regal – rows of trees set alongside beautiful, opulent-looking Victorian buildings – sectioned off in mini roundabouts by old fountains and tall statues. Many bohemian folk live here and I’m sharing a top-floor flat with my musician friend Jez while recovering from ME after glandular fever had swept through my body. My friend D visits to see how I am doing. She has a waspish energy, like an unattended hosepipe thrashing around, and unless she’s stoned at the end of a night out rarely do I see her still. Restless as a storm, her body athletic and chiselled, she paces around my living room, then leans out of the window to have a cigarette. On the exhale, she tells me she now has an allotment, and I break into a smile. I cannot imagine this charismatic heart of the dance floor bent over with a spade tending veg. With a withering look, she stubs out the cigarette butt on the windowsill and tells me that she has made friends with her allotment neighbours (all retired). She loves sharing cups of tea and cake with them and learning about their lives: one allotmenteer had given her purple broccoli and peas for dinner that she said melted in her mouth. Admonishing my smile with a sideways look and a flick of her long dark fringe, she suggests that getting an allotment might be good for my recuperation. I should get in touch with the council for a plot. Not wanting to disagree with her formidable forthrightness, I do what she says.

For a few pounds a month, I am soon offered a plot on Chanterlands Avenue Allotments near the disused railway line. I arrive on my ancient sturdy Dutch bike, but I can’t see D anywhere. An elderly man asks me my name and laughs, gesturing at the sunglasses perched on tip of my head. ‘Ooh, come from the French Riviera, have you?’ he smirks, but leads me to my patch. He tells me that I can ask the council to rotavate it, ‘just the once for free, mind, and then it’s just you and elbow grease’. He introduces me to a neighbour and he in turn offers me a bottle of dusky home-made wine as a welcome. Another shows me his abundant flower patch with hundreds of bobbing daffodils. I feel both welcomed and slightly intimidated. I have never really considered what I eat or the seasonal connection with any weight. In the whirlwind of socialising, working and going to gigs, then illness, everything I buy is from Jacksons Stores, quick to cook and abundant all year around. Through one shed’s window, I spy a hand-drawn chart of what will come up when and times to sow; spidery drawings of flowers and veg done in fine black pen alongside motifs for the seasons, an artwork in itself.

I go up to the allotment each week as much as I can planting in higgledy-piggledy rows that resemble unravelled knitting. In time, the tops of carrots begin to poke through and the mangetout start to wrap their soft tendrils around rigid canes. I am comforted somehow by the fact that as I work I know that there are potatoes nestled warm under the earth. My input varies according to fatigue, and some days it’s enough just to sit and watch the birds. I am intimidated by the abundance all around me: flowers, scarecrows lurching on poles like drunks at a bar, mosaics made from beach-found glass shimmering in the sun, driftwood mobiles and bottle tops clanking merrily in the breeze. This haphazard community – a contrast to the rows of neat houses just a skip away – seems to reuse and repurpose so much, and joyously so. I am happy here alone, fudging it all, with benevolent smiles and greetings from others, whole generations and lives lived distinctly apart – but communing here.

One day, not too many months after my allotment dabbling begins, my sister visits from Leeds and I have a bike accident after not the brightest move: a pizza box balanced precariously on my handlebars to take home for tea. A teenager darts across the road in front of me and I brake too hard and hit the deck with my legs still entangled between the crossbar and the wheels. A speedy hospital visit and then weeks of hobbling ensue. When I do get back to my patch, I find it in a state of undress. Everything has shrivelled through lack of water, been pecked at or is bolted and leggy. My potatoes are the only hardy, stoic survivors. It’s an overcast day to match my mood and for once there are no other growers there to share my dismay. I decide to hand my patch back to the municipal authorities and admit defeat, tail between my bruised legs.

In 2017, my sister dies suddenly from an innocuous sore throat, which turns rapidly into sepsis. Not realising that she is becoming gravely ill, she tends to her ailing children. She leaves us on an early evening in March, close to what would have been her birthday and Mother’s Day. In the ensuing days, weeks and months I feel as if I am falling down a well every time I shut my eyes and try to sleep. When I wake, for a few dewy split seconds I forget that she is gone until the pain comes screaming through me raptor-like once more. I bookend the days gazing at the blank green expanses of my garden lawn in the early light, and again last thing at night, trying to figure out in the darkness how someone I loved and knew all my life simply doesn’t exist any more. I feel guilty as I don’t live near her young children, the eldest about to sit his GCSEs, the youngest a tender four years old.

Aside from planting numerous sickly coloured selections of flowers from a DIY chain and demolishing some badly built, cracked old cement troughs, I have not really been bothering with our city garden. Yet one day, months after my sister’s death, I am wandering around by the trees, unable to rally myself, and touch the heavy bowing blossom heads of an elder. My brain tells me that Rachael will never know that I am here doing this, and I immediately feel ludicrous as it’s not a thing I would ever have reported to her. Yet this simple impossibility burns everything down and suddenly I am lost again, at sea. My chest seizes up and tears storm my cheeks like liquid released from a shaken bottle. I decide then to bury my hands in the earth.

The next day, my young son and I arrive at the garden centre where I head for the young plants, not yet confident enough to grow from seed. I reach for peas, courgettes, runner beans, tomatoes; he chooses strawberries and pumpkins, anticipating the intense thrill of a Halloween to come. We arrive home and I assemble click-clack flower beds, thinking of my sister who was devoted to her brood but also supported me from afar with my disabled child. Despite her shyness, Rachael would always reach out to elderly neighbours and run their errands, would always support me with my daughter. That she will never grow into middle age herself sends pains into my breastbone as I pat down the earth. That done, my five-year-old boy merrily proclaims that ‘now we have a vegetable garden!’, enthused by the illustrations he’s seen in his Richard Scarry books. My daughter sits close, playing with the remnants of the compost from the bag, sifting it through her fingers like rubbing pastry, utterly absorbed. Once the weather warms and the produce springs into action, a tortoiseshell butterfly often flits around and lands on my son near the beds. I think of my sister’s long pale fingers, as delicate as its fragile wings.

Within weeks, we see stealthy runner beans creeping up a wigwam of canes, and after a couple of months we are joyfully picking peas and strawberries and placing them into bowls with pride, admiring our small teatime crop. Despite assurances that courgettes are easy to grow, they haven’t made an appearance, and we never quite manage to grow a pumpkin in which to carve crooked teeth. The next year, we collect a rescue kitten from a sanctuary on the Holloway Road and she starts using the beds as a litter tray. I remove the surrounding soil, spray citrusy water as a deterrent, put up nets, but soon the squirrels follow suit, digging furiously to bury their hoard. I feel defeated. My son loses enthusiasm. The canes remain in place, totemic for a further few months, yet even they are eventually pulled down and replaced by white anemones, ferns, grasses, driftwood brought back from the coast sticking out at strange angles and scarlet poppies thrilling the eye for their transient and glorious days. Every now and then, small juicy strawberries appear to give the birds or insects something to nibble at. A tortoiseshell arrives again the following summer and each year until we leave, flitting around the willow tree, landing on my son’s sleeve or sometimes on my daughter’s amber-streaked chestnut hair. A reminder, perhaps, not to forget how fragile things can be.

After eight years in our East End borough, and twenty overall in the city, we decide to turn things upside down and move. With the ‘tired of London, tired of life’ maxim hovering over me like a neon sign, and all the clichés of moving to the country in middle age ringing, it is something rather different that motivates our relocation. It is becoming ever harder to navigate the city with a growing disabled child. She is often over-stimulated and there are few places to take her safely without overcrowded public transport being involved. After an extensive period of shielding her during the pandemic and a lack of childcare support, we are collectively exhausted. My son too has been crushed by returning to an unsympathetic teacher who doesn’t understand his dreamy forgetful nature and my partner has had an unexpected health scare, enough to shake him and keep him awake at night. In the cruel short days of early January 2022, my mother died a harrowing death after a short but scarifying illness in her early seventies. And so, against all odds and after a hard battle as banks start to close their doors to new mortgages, we somehow slip through and sell our little house with its beloved garden. We buy another in Devon by the skin of our teeth, to go back near to where my partner grew up.

On one of our last days in the city, I sit with my friend Madeleine in her allotment behind the leisure centre drinking tea as she too prepares for a move, in her case overseas. A gallery professional, ceramicist and vibrant conversationalist, she is shaping up her plot for her successor, the growing season nearly over. Birds in the hedgerows chatter shrilly and the watery early September sun warms our heads. We discuss the fears around our respective upheavals, the leap into the unknown, the impact on our kids and partners. Both of us have worked for a long time in the arts and have no connections or jobs to go to – but go we must. I stretch languidly like a cat as I get off the allotment chair and imagine the expanse of Dartmoor spreading before me in its autumnal bracken, lichen and peaty waters – my chest rises in giddy anticipation. Our new house will be buried deep in a hamlet at the foot of Dartmoor’s moody hills and hers in the mountainous ranges of southern France. She hands me three plants and some soft fruit to take home, and we squeeze each other goodbye in solidarity. I am aware of the town clock chiming three peals in the distance, and within three weeks we shall be waving goodbye to this home in Walthamstow, its marshes, green open parks, allotments and beloved friends.

*

We arrive in Devon and I immediately want to grow something. I want to put down physical as well as emotional roots. Yet planning anything is made almost impossible by the sheer amount of renovation needed to make the house watertight and by the fight to get a suitable school place for my daughter. I panic that time is running away and a strong current of adrenalin courses through my body as I decide to try to create a patch right now. I need to anchor myself to something outside the house. I dip into Charles Dowding’s No Dig book, mulching the red earth with the rotting hay and compost I have to hand and hastily planting redcurrant and blackberry bushes, kale, cabbages, cauliflowers, potatoes, pinky-red chard. Between the rows, I place the large flattish stones I have dug up from the earth, creating a pathway that curves like the crescent moon that’s hanging over me as I finish, parched and filthy. I am deliriously happy out here; alone and glad of it.

The hamlet in which we’ve found ourselves is largely a farming community. On our lane there are nine houses, in four of which live farmers, up at the break of day and working valiantly into the night, tractor headlights on most days of the week. Some work for other farmers or landowners, others rent land for their livestock or have their own spaces on the curvilinear green hills. Most of my neighbours stop to chat regularly at the front gate, or we wave or nod heads in the early hours when it seems too indecently early for words. One farmer has an allotment next to the ancient well that we can see from our kitchen window, which yields him an enviable amount of produce, including sweet peas by the bunch that he sells in a little roadside box, common here but which I still find surprising and somehow magical. In the blazing heat of late May he invites me onto his patch to show me his bounty. The cauldron-like vat in which he stirs his secret-recipe plant feed takes my breath away with its fetid potency.