Millennial gardening memoir; bush turkey battles
This week I am mainly battling a baby bush turkey that likes to stroll around the front and back yards and vigorously scratch up any plants or earth it can find. When I say battling, I mainly mean rushing out and yelling at it until it wobbles away, ungainly and awkward but defiant.
What I’m reading
I just tore through what’s been described as a “millennial gardening memoir”: Rootbound by Alice Vincent.
It only came out yesterday, and as you can see from that rather sad picture, I was so impatient to read it that I bought it on my Kindle. The physical book is clothbound and much more beautiful, I gather. (Side note: I LOVE my Kindle for travelling, because I read so much that there’s no way I could ever carry as many books as I need, but it isn’t quite as good a reading experience as a paper book. I don’t remember content as well when I read on a screen, so I find the Kindle’s best for fun, plot-driven reads rather than fact-heavy non-fiction.)
(Another side note: it must be so depressing for authors when they spend years writing a book and getting it published, and then people like me read it in less than 24 hours. I’M SORRY, Alice Vincent.)
I did read this in less than 24 hours - so, too quickly - and I’ll return to it. It’s the story of how a difficult breakup precipitated London journalist Alice Vincent into the world of plants, and how the turning of the seasons and the green embrace of gardening began the process of healing. If that sounds a bit twee, the fault is in my summary, not the book itself - it’s lovely. She covers a lot of territory: from explaining how her generation of millennials, largely locked out of home-owning and garden-tending and family-having, turned to houseplants; to the history of public parks in London; to potted biographies of notable female gardeners. These glorious snippets of info are counterpointed by lyrical descriptions of urban nature: “The kindling had caught by mid-October; leaves tipped in bronze and umber drifted prettily…”; “It was an ice cream dawn, pink streaking a sky that dwarfed the city and glossed the millions of glass panels that comprise it.” The view from the door to her plant-crammed balcony is beguiling: “a flicker of long, pointed bamboo leaves framing the left of it, the silhouette of a starry lupin leaf straight ahead.”
And the “I gardened myself better” elements are thoughtful and never stray into cliche: she speaks of how soothing she found the gardener’s ability to project herself into the future, planning where plants will go and how they’ll look once grown: “This time-travelling of gardening - to imagine months ahead - offers a balm… You can stand in a garden and look at it in the depths of winter and see a vision of lush foliage and frothing blossom, opening flower buds and autumn-painted leaves.”
Change and death are all natural processes in the garden, and this too Vincent writes about with grace: of Dutch garden designer Piet Oudolf’s creations, she writes: “Each season brings a different drama… Inevitably, the garden becomes a grand closet of skeletons… Death is in the garden as well.”
It’s an observation at once obvious and totally new, thanks to her rendering of it - as useful a definition as any of good writing.
In fact, her observations of greened spaces and little histories of people and places are so good that I rather regretted when she returned to the subject of her breakup; I felt a bit like a bad friend, wishing she would get over it already and get back to the interesting stuff. (This is of course dependent on the reader; if I were going through a breakup myself, I’m sure these are the sections I’d love the most.)
Vincent concludes the book with some beautiful reflections on friendship and growing up that made me cry. In a good way.
What I’m listening to
As usual, I got a bit obsessed with the author (her Instagram is great) and searched for any podcasts she might have appeared on. I first heard about her on this episode of the excellent Gardens, Weeds and Words, which I’ve previously recommended, and she speaks more about her creative process on this episode of Artists in Residence. In this conversation, Vincent also reveals she’s just had an idea for her next book - hurray!
Wishing you plenty of gardening insights and zero bad breakups,
Hannah x