This Allotment: Stories of Growing, Eating and Nurturing

(Hardback)

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Description

An allotment. A 10 pole space about the size of a doubles tennis court for the growing of fruit and vegetables. 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 fiercely, but also of welcoming arms, gifted gluts and new recipes from across the seas.

They are places of resilience, resistance and freedom with a radical history (and the potential to be so again). They are blowsy dahlias, cricket on the radio and pigeons in lofts; buzzing bees and the wisdom of weeds and seeds.

This Allotment brings together twelve brilliant writers in a glorious celebration of these entirely unique spaces: plots that mean so much more than the soil upon which they sit.

Reviews

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 books 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

Author Bio

Sarah Rigby is an editor and book coach, and Publishing Director at the vibrant independent Elliott & Thompson. Sarah has worked with some of the countrys best-loved and award-winning writers of nature and place, including Rob Cowen (Common Ground); Nancy Campbell (Fifty Words for Snow); James Aldred (Goshawk Summer); Rebecca Schiller (Earthed) and Alice Roberts (Tamed). Originally from Yorkshire, she now lives in London with her family where she has an allotment and volunteers for the food-growing workers co-op, Organic Lea. She is very proud of her yellow courgettes this year.