I’d given away my seed packets it was too expensive to replace the white currants and ginger rosemary I’d bought as romantic presents for my first garden. It was Passchendaele out there an icy sea of mud, minus the nutritious corpses. The surviving pots stood on the roof terrace, like a promise of a garden, but when my friends peered over the balcony their faces fell. Proudly, I would show visitors my rolling 0.0111197 acre. Underneath that juicy ivy lay a partially paved nine-by-five-metre garden. Before acquiring a table or sofa, I was out there pulling at the ivy in unsuitable footwear hacking at the only vertical plant, an immense yucca, with a Woolworths junior saw. This time, the kind removal men couldn’t stop grinning. The roof terrace could be my off-kitchen herb garden and the maelstrom downstairs my home allotment. I kept hunting.Īnd then, many north-facing AstroTurfed abominations later, I had a revelation. But this was London and I could afford only a flat, with a bare roof terrace, and metal stairs to a dark rectangle of ivy and bramble at the end of the downstairs tenant’s garden, in full view of her Bible study group. I searched for a little brick house with a modest garden a miniature of my old home. I began to ache for the decade’s worth of strange edible plants still growing in my lost garden generations of guinea pig poo forked into the soil the black gold souring in the compost bins the greenhouse my son had built from stones and a plastic bag. I became the New Yorker’s gardening correspondent I even reached number 139 on the allotment waiting list.Ī crocus in Charlotte’s allotment garden. I described how I force-fed my six square metres of polluted soil with nutrients while yearning for manure boycotted famous garden writers because of their orchards stole broken trellis from skips for my climbing beans tended my compost bins, plural, like newborn babies fantasised about ponds and mulberries bought, after enormous deliberation and research, a terrible cold frame. Despite moments of lyricism, that book is chiefly a confession of obsessive passion and the perils of ineptitude a paean to the beauty of green and the pleasures of greed and a testament to the unceasing joy my laughable urban jungle gave me, despite my having no horticultural pedigree or much of a clue. Rhapsody In Green is a love letter to growing something, anything: from a straggling geranium on a balcony to a tiny city garden filled, as mine was, with a frankly ridiculous number of edible plants. ![]() Five years ago, I was so in love with my first garden that I wrote a book about it.
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