Taken from the album Wild Love, out now on Transgressive.

“The kind of base line is that I am alive… I’m so alive and I’m so grateful for that. You get to do all these things and feel all these things and you’re in a body and you get to express yourself and you have to or you’re gonna explode.
They’re all love songs, really. Romantic love, love for my family, my friends, love for the landscape. It’s about intense emotional entanglement with other beings.”

How will you / have you prepare(d) for your death?

I know the beginning and the end. The rest is smoke, its tendrils weaving into an enormous field of blank space. Many faces vanish into the dark night of the past. I rest underneath a sequence of memories that fade away like the inky text on a grocery receipt. I don’t like to let things disappear, but they still do despite my concern, and they always will – gone like that story I once heard about Prophet Muhammad, the story that darts into the wood of my childhood like a deer slippery with rainfall. Or the one that mingles with the chapter of my father bent over his tasbih while, outside, trees snap back in the northerly wind. All that in-between space. All that cigarette smoke that clouds the memories of my small-town past. For many years now, amongst the clutches of illnesses in my family, I have lived in anticipatory grief. It drapes over everything, every emotion, every desire, obscuring the narratives underneath. The notion of death presses quietly against us. My mother tells me that I was born with a burial plot, a little section of earth, a halved and halved again slot of prairie. I wonder if it is next to my grandfather’s plot in Calgary, those fragments of his life that I’ve always wondered about. My sisters have one too. All of us do, in the vicinity of one another. This is a tradition, or even a methodology, to keep us together beyond the materiality of our bodies. This is a metaphysical kind of togetherness. I was born into a religion that wants to eternally house my soul. My mother tells me about my burial plot when I’m visiting home, luggage thrown in the back seat, the oceanic distance sweetly closed between us. We have spent our lives wandering away from one another only to arrive together, again, someday in death. Later, my mother sits next to me with our whippet, Samantha, stretched out between us and the bright winter sun streaming in through wide windows. The light strikes our hands in a way that suggests forever. The whole visit I think about past lives and what might have come before the beginning. I think of all the life I will tread across and all the land that I will eventually become. Deer. Soil. Daughter. Wind. Smoke. Rain. Amen.

*

And what would you say if you could?

It’s not enough. Grief enters the dream body and something inside shifts. The lens through which I view the world is one of constant change. All things, even the mundane, slot into before and after. I picture a hard, round knot inside my chest. Something in-between the size of a glass bead and a marble. Every so often, I think it rolls or slides and I feel a twinge. Other times, it’s a large object, both invasive and flaring, too great to tamp down, too nebulous to unwind. These days, everything feels like a raw nerve. I see a small bird enclaved in a small tree and call it grief. At the height of the worst storm of the year, I fixate on roadside ferns splitting wildly in the red warning wind. My floral duvet is peeled apart and I refuse to leave my bed. Is it okay to put that here, in this visible and public space? This is an admission of my flaws and sorrows. I wonder if it’s my trespass as the author of these words, or the trespass of the person who reads them. Poetry itself rarely feels like enough, not nearly as often as it feels like spectacle. Another shift. Grief is the cold weather grazing. Grief is the dim lamplight growing darker. Grief is the missed video call or else its grainy picture. Grief is the dullest pull at the most sensitive heart. Grief is listening to ‘Blue Is the Eye’ while driving further away from home. Grief is green hills and farmland and first lost languages in the distance. Grief is the inability to describe the always cooling tea. Grief is the artist on stage whose eyes close as they hit the perfect note and suddenly you think oh my god why am I crying?

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‘Shorelines: Memory, migration and the selves we become’ by Alycia Pirmohamed is out now and available here, published by Canongate (£18.04).

They are also accepting spoken word recordings of observations of the environment around you, and spoken word recordings of your poetry or non-fiction prose extracts detailing your experiences and feelings of being in the natural world.

The recordings do not need to be high quality — they can be as simple as a phone recording.  The project is also open to more complex work by seasoned field recordists.  The point is: anyone can contribute.

The aim of The Ecological Listening Project is to compile recordings and spoken word descriptions of ecosystems from around the world in order to make an online living archive of auditory ecological memory.

It will reflect not only the different soundscapes of different landscapes on earth, but also how those soundscapes change and evolve — how they sound at dawn or dusk, in winter or summer, or how they might change in years to come.

This is also about how important it is to protect our soundscapes so that they never become memories forever, to keep hearing that same birdsong, insect hum or frog call many years from now.

Send audio submissions to contact@rivermargin.com as an email attachment or via a file sharing service (eg. WeTransfer). It is free to submit and will always be free to listen: this is a collaborative listening project.

Guidelines

— Field recordings must not exceed twenty minutes.

— Files must be in mp3 format.

— You must include your name (or a moniker) if you want your recording attributed to you, and we also want the following details included in the body of the email:

• Date, geographic location and time of day that the recording was made, eg. ‘Recorded beside the Clackamas River in Mt. Hood National Forest on 23rd June, 2025 at approximately 12pm’, or ‘A recording of how it sounds inside a tree hollow in the Otways, recorded at approximately 5pm on 1st January, 2024’. Please include the country.

— If you would like to be featured as a contributor, please include a short bio as well as your name and any relevant links you wish to include.

Make your submission here.

Hello! Gwydion’s Garden looks incredible — an absolute treasure trove of all things green, earthy and countercultural. How did it come about as an idea? What is the shop’s ethos?

Thanks! It came about both slowly and quickly. I’ve been a collector for a good few years of 60’s/70s underground press, particularly anything to do with ecology and alternative ways of living.

The shop came about as I was struggling to find work after moving from Wales. A unit became available, so the stars aligned and I’m glad that things have worked out the way they have.

If it has any ethos I think it would be a guiding belief that another world is possible.

Can you tell us about the shop’s name? 

The shop is called Gwydion’s Garden which is taken from Gandalf’s Garden, a counter-culture spot in London and Gwydion Fab Dôn from the fourth branch of the Mabinogion who was an enchanter and born of the trees. I feel like both represent the spirit of what’s inside the books.

Have you always liked old books and ephemera? What has your relationship to books been like over the course of your life?

I’ve always been drawn to typography, comics and self-publishing. I used to send off for punk zines when I was younger which had a huge influence on me and my outlook on the world. I definitely owe a great deal to the people who wrote and published those zines. Music was definitely my way into reading and then comics got me excited about creating new worlds.

I love bits of ephemera and I’ve got a collection on the go of some of the things I find in the books. It tells you a lot about its journey through various hands and homes. I also have notes that people have written me too, for example someone gave me a note that said the book was horrid and cursed. I’m wondering if I should tell the person who eventually buys it.

I leave most of the ephemera in the book though because I feel like it’s meant for that person to find and keep. I also don’t always find it, so sometimes when people let me know it’s a surprise to me too!

I’d say my relationship with reading and owning books has been a tricky one. I remember not being a wholly enthusiastic reader in school. I seem to remember lying a lot to my teachers about what I was reading, like the time I said I was reading Ivanhoe when I was actually reading Biker Mice from Mars. So it’s something I’ve formed a better relationship with as an adult.

What is your favourite item in the shop right now? Do you have any personal favourite magazines or books that you like to look out for, and if so can you tell us about them?

My favourite at the moment is Granfaloon which is a fantasy fanzine from the 70s. Just the paper stock, hand drawn typefaces and illustrations are beautiful.

Mother Earth News is also great, it’s so full of great information and is still being published. I’ve learnt a lot from it and the sister publication Lifestyle, so I always look for them.

In general I have a very long list of the things  that I look out for, but it’s great to be surprised by finding things I’m not expecting.

Is there a “holy grail” publication you’re always looking for for your personal collection?

I recently found it! It’s a natural building book called Dwelling by River from 1977 which I’ve been thinking about for a very long time. I had to pinch myself when I found it in a book shop in Swansea for 35p. It’d be a rare book to find in California where it was made, let alone in South Wales. It felt really bizarre timing to find it and maybe a little cosmic nod that I’m on the right track.

I’ve got my eye on a few things for my own collection that are likely unattainable! Way out of my price point would be the Modern Utopian issues by Dick Fairfield. I’d love to see inside them.

There’s also the complete collection of Fuck You/ A Magazine of the Arts by Ed Sanders of the Fugs which is being sold for £33,000. I hope a museum buys it. I have some Tuli Kupfberg magazines and I’m always interested in anything Fugs/publishing related.

What kinds of things can we glean from nature-adjacent publications of days past?

There was a level of optimism in those publications that has definitely changed. There is a lot of discourse about some of the publications being too idealistic but I’d argue that it’s worse to passively accept the world as it is.

What I take from a lot of the publications is that the nuts and bolts of creating energy, growing food and living in community have been tried and tested for many many years and we should still trust and use that information. And in the days of AI…protect it.

It’s interesting for me to read those publications and look at where the author is now. Do they still live the life they wrote about back then? Sometimes it’s yes, sometimes no and sometimes it’s not as straightforward. I’ve read accounts from some of the back to the land writers that they don’t believe self-sufficiency is possible but that just tells me that we truly need each other and we need community.

The pressing issues at the time may have been slightly different but they do ultimately link back to a central problem of an extractive system that puts profit before people.

Your stock — not just the books but also your posters and badges — brings together a few different strands: gardening, nature, cooking, spiritualism, activism and the politics of peace, to name a handful. The tagline on your posters sums it up (delightfully) as “Books for your third eye”.  What kinds of books open the third eye? What kinds of qualities are you looking for in a Gwydion’s Garden book — be that aesthetic, or ideological? How would you best define the banner under which all the wonderful things you stock come together?

I think the banner would be a triptych of hope, curiosity and wonder. I think a good Gwydion’s Garden book would make you question reality in a positive way and maybe take you down some rabbit holes to other writers and topics, and then down some ant holes into even weirder stuff.

I’ll always gravitate to anything that was part of the counter-culture movement. In terms of aesthetics I’m a typography nerd so sometimes I will unashamedly acquire a book purely because I love the typeface and hope for the best in terms of what’s inside.

I’m also motivated to save information that I think is really important. For example I have a few flora and fauna books from countries who have been at war. That feels really vital to protect, especially as a tactic of war is to destroy the food system and the soil, which in turn wipes out beneficial plants and species. Having a record of what was abundant before the war is another way of recording the harm done to the people.

What drew you to Hebden Bridge? What are some of your favourite features of the nearby landscape? Have you foraged anything good from the hedgerows recently?

It’s a really beautiful place with a beautiful landscape. The thing I love the most is all of the moss, ferns, lichen and mushrooms. I also really like hearing stories about all the mystical and cosmic happenings in the valley.

I collect seeds for the shop on walks, so there’s usually some free seed to take home with a book. Foraging is definitely something I could do with knowing more about. As someone who has sold a lot of copies of Food for Free by Richard Mabey, I could do with reading a copy myself!

I can’t help but ask about your world champion nettle-eating. I believe you’ve won the world nettle-eating championships 2x over, which, aside from anything else, is cool as hell. I’m probably clutching at stingy stalks here, but I wondered: how can nettle-eating inform what you’re doing with the shop — or, more widely, how can nettle-eating inform the way you life your life?

Haha I actually think it deepened my connection with that particular plant! I have an affinity with the nettle and it’s such an important plant to me that I want to champion. It’s food, it’s medicine, it’s a host plant for so many living creatures and it’s deeply misunderstood and overlooked.

I guess my participation in the nettle eating came about from a lack of thinking things through, and the book shop also came about without really thinking it through and I know there is the saying ‘grasp the nettle’. So maybe that’s a good way to approach some things in life.

I think having a deep connection with a plant is a good thing to seek out for yourself. Spend time with it, watch it change through the seasons, learn what creatures call it home and which ones call it food, protect it, keep its seed and join its cycle through the year. I have a few plants and trees that are special to me, particularly nettle, yew and mugwort.

Finally, if Gwydion’s Garden was a physical garden, what plants would be growing in it and why?

It would have really good soil with lots of worms and as many host plants as possible for all the bugs and pollinators. Lots of tall plants for spiders.

There’d be all the worts — mugwort, ragwort, stitchwort etc. Probably lots of illegal structures with an open door for everyone. And an abundance of nettles!

*

Gwydion’s Garden, Hebble End Works, Hebden Bridge is open Thursday -Sunday, 11am – 4pm. Follow the shop on Instagram here.

Find an extract from the interview below.

Some quick-fire questions to start.

Throughout Q is for Garden, you take us through the delights of your garden in South East London. What is your favourite part of the garden in the month of July?

My garden is a strange little space – it’s East-facing so the morning sun hits it early in summer, but in winter the sun barely rises over the backs of the terraces it adjoins. The garden studio I write from faces the opposite direction – back towards the flat, so I see the sunniest part in the mornings. That white-painted wall is my favourite part at the moment. It shelters the gigantic jasmine bush, and beneath that there is an unseasonal display of sweetpeas, rudbeckia and osteospermum. Though I can see all the terrors of climate crisis in this little garden, it still teaches me joy.

You rely on various films throughout the book, including Double Tide and Ten Thousand Waves. Is it fair to say that Q is for Garden was as much inspired by your love of film, as much as a love for reading?

Undoubtedly! For me it’s about all about inspiration – which is as likely to come from a fiddlehead as it does from a screen. Though my initial training was in languages and literature, I taught film and visual culture for many years. I love how film makes worlds – that is both its power and its danger. There’s a lot of film out there that just seeks to replicate the hypercapitalist, extractive world that shapes much of our global politics – when it could be showing worlds otherwise. Experimental films like Sharon Lockhart’s Double Tide, or Isaac Julien’s Ten Thousand Waves show what that otherwise could be and already is.

Some of your most compelling or interesting passages in the book were, for me, in your discussion of how your clothes and the way your body feels has become connected to your garden. This crossover between absolute control of the size and shape of a fruit, the insect or weed populations in a garden, and mastery over human bodies I find very compelling. Could you explain to our readers how your perception of your own body continues to be transformed in the act of gardening?

Ha, great question! I could write a whole book about just this topic. When I am gardening, I don’t feel ‘perceived’ in the ways that I often do in human company. That’s not about me – it’s about the socialised conditions of seeing that are to do with judging, measuring up, and quantifying the worth of a living being.We’re all stuck in that matrix, because it’s part of the social and knowledge systems we’ve grown up with. It is linked to sciences like botany and zoology, and pseudo-sciences like racial biology, which were about quantifying biocapital to serve European colonial expansion. But there’s a problem with knowing things intellectually. I might know that my acute body dysmorphia/dysphoria is linked to wider systemic problems, but what I feel in my body is shame. And often a desire to disappear!

When I garden – and I don’t garden in a particularly regimented or rigorous way – my presence is noticed completely differently. Through the vibrations of my footfall, for example, or the biochemical traces of my skin in the soil. My body shape, size, skin pigmentation, speed of movement, gesture, posture, gendering – none of this matters to a plant. It doesn’t matter to the garden. What matters is my place in it, what I offer, and what I receive. In my garden, I can let go of the shame of being perceived – and that allows for other things to grow instead. My creative being; my gender plurality. And those things I’m only beginning to understand.

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‘Q is for Garden: Tending the histories of queer cultivation’ is out now and available here, published by Manchester University Press. Read an extract here. Read Kate Bradbury’s review here.

Jenny Chamarette is a writer, curator and cultural critic. I first came across their work in This Allotment: Stories of growing, eating and nurturing, an anthology of tales of allotment life, edited by Sarah Rigby. Chamarette’s story is one of reconnecting with nature via their allotment in the context of a sudden debilitating illness, the Covid pandemic and the climate crisis. Their first book, Q is for Garden: Tending the histories of queer cultivation, sees Chamarette continue this story via both their garden and allotment, while also weaving in histories of queer gardeners such as Derek Jarman, Vita Sackville-West and (perhaps) Gertrude Jeykyll. There’s a queering of other horticultural histories, too, including of Jean Baret, the first woman to have circumnavigated the globe on explorer Louis Antoine de Bougainville’s expedition from 1766–1769 (she was only able to do so as she was dressed as a man), and the ‘Kewriosities’ – the first women gardeners at Kew who were required to wear the same uniform as the men so as not to distract their male colleagues (they inspired much ridicule from the London Press). Then there’s the queerness of the plant world itself: the hermaphrodite snails, the bisexual and transitioning trees and flowers. And the author writes eloquently of the language that connects us with the natural world. Of the etymology of root, radix and radical, they say:

‘Root and rhizome. Rage and root. Root and radical. What was my process of taking root? Of radicalisation?’

As Chamarette states in their introduction, the Q of the book is for questioning, querying and queer. They ask questions that I didn’t know I wanted the answer to, offer connections between queerness and the soil that I didn’t know I needed. This is a memoir, certainly, but it is as much about Chamarette’s own experiences of realising (and moving into) their queerness, and of their battle with depression and the healing powers of the soil – ‘when there was nothing, there was the garden. The allotment. The tiny place of being that did not require reading, writing, thinking’ – as it is about the treatment and oppression of queers throughout history, as it is about tomatoes and the colonial assaults that led to the cultivation of them today. They say, ‘sitting with the Q of the garden is where I began. Seeing the invisible in the visible. Finding the trace of scent in the air. Sometimes that scent is heavy, mossy, earth-bound’.

At times there is rage: the treatment of Saartjie Baartman (the ‘Hottentot Venus’), the ‘shameful truth of white complicity in empire, colonial botany and racial violence’, anti-vaxxers, ‘gender-critical tears’. They link the centuries-old oral history of herbalism with queer trans colonial botany: ‘Queerness in the Straight. Queerness in the empire’s asylums and prisons. Queer all over, entwined in the shivering bodies of plants and humans’.

Of systemic oppression they write ‘queerness and gender fluidity have always been a part of landscapes of Britain. They are suppressed by the same hands who systematically deny that post-renaissance Britain was a colonising nation upon whose hands will always be the blood of peoples it wittingly or unwittingly subjugated and destroyed. Am I angry? Yes, I am.’

But, there is hope, too. Chamarette reminds us: 

‘In 1943, at one of the darkest points in the twentieth century… Eve Balfour [the co-founder of the Soil Association] spoke of the hope and gifts of the soil.’

Of the climate crisis they write ‘the Q in the climate crisis is about learning again to see myself in the landscape, to see and feel, with hands in the mud, what an intimate, personal relationship with the land might be.’

And for this queer gardener, about to up-sticks and move to the woods on her own journey to be closer to a larger patch of land, they write: ‘anyone who has experienced a major life transition will know its accompanying sense of lostness. It is not comfortable to shift the ground you walk on. But it is necessary for the continuation of life.’

Gardening has always been queer; queers have always gardened. But it is nice to read that someone has queered the landscape for us, queered the botanical histories, asked questions, made assumptions that hadn’t been made out loud before. All queers know the feeling of not fitting in, of working out their sense of place in the world. In Q is for Garden we find it.

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‘Q is for Garden: Tending the histories of queer cultivation’ is out now and available here, published by Manchester University Press. Read an extract here.

Kate Bradbury is a garden writer based in Brighton. Her latest book ‘One Garden Against the World: In Search of Hope in a Changing Climate’ is published by Bloomsbury Wildlife. Read Kate’s Substack here.

After receiving a review copy of Ed Douglas’ Upland in the post I was, at first, daunted by its size — this is a mountain of a book about mountains. But I needn’t have worried; if you love the uplands of Britain, or wish to become better acquainted with what made them, then this is essential reading. Ed sets a lofty goal from the — to show, in his words, that ‘everything is to do about mountains’. That mountains are political, inspirational, consequential, and that they are, above all else, essential. 

‘There is deep human history here, not just rocks’ says an early chapter. But though certainly there are rocks, they are never quite as heavy as you’d have a right to expect — the (more or less) rock chapter ‘Time’s Chord’ is a joy. Douglas frames the big questions that were wrestled over by great minds (and egos) of the age as if we’re in on the puzzle. Upland is always at its best when the human stories bleed through the geology, the flora, the fauna, allowing the reader to relate to and root for these landscapes and its creatures. There are abundant morsels of mountain trivia that sustain interest as we move through epochs and eras, wars and battles, plantations, executions, deforestations, and reforestations. 

Human protagonists (and antagonists) are, for the most part (through no fault of the author’s), male soldiers, lords, hunters, priests, surveyors, artists, ecologists, and the like. It is, at times, a sequence of men variously pushing or being pushed around hills and glens by miscellaneous and changeable forces of trade, weather, culture, greed, sheep, and trees. But when history sits up and decides to start recording the other half of the population, I was delighted to be introduced to such remarkable people as the alpinist Emmeline Lewis-Lloyd, or the writer, suffragette, socialist, and mountain lover Hannah Mitchell — such a different breed to the snobbish Mary Wordsworth.

Often, past events and conflicts remind us that many of the challenges of today’s hills are iterative — from the way commodification turns ‘nature into profit at the expense of human souls’, to elitist attitudes toward the general public (rugged country being ‘no place for lowlanders’ is an expression you might have lifted from an Eryri Facebook page or National Park forum meeting today).

Often the reader is teased with reference to poetry or prose from many languages and landscapes, rarely quoted in any length. I found this occasionally frustrating, but entertained myself in the extracurricular quests to find their works — of Waldo Williams, Duncan Bàn MacIntyre, Dafydd ap Gwilym, RS Thomas, and the rest of them. Footnotes also invariably add useful context as well as interest and humour. 

If I were to offer a mild critique – and perhaps it is one-eyed of me as a Welshman to do so — it is that while there is a great and anthropologically rich telling of the strife(s) that repeatedly befell the Scottish uplands and left them empty and stripped, the telling of the slow emptying and natural decline of the Welsh uplands is only touched upon briefly. It’s acknowledged that Welsh voices in various eras were not heard so loudly as others, but I had hoped to see more of that story here — somewhat less sustained and bloody though it was. It would have been special to see the stories of the independently quarrying commoners who fought against enclosure (and their subsequent imprisonment and deportation) or the fight against ‘Y Sais Bach’ (the little Englishman, Augustus Brackenbury)’ on y Mynydd Bach in Cardiganshire. In any case, for most of the book, we fly between the three countries involved at a hare’s pace. It can at times be jarring when the narrative thread is yanked away from compelling places and people, but there’s always something on the next page to draw you back in.

I admit, I’d been looking forward to the chapter on shooting estates. The story of how our uplands became hostage to bloodsports enjoyed only by the most elite and wealthy in society is not one that particularly deserves a neutral telling, but the account is forensic — a dispassionate deconstruction of the myth of the noble art of deer stalking and how it was manufactured, alongside other mountain bloodsports. The tale is punctuated by the acts of barbarity that were essential ingredients of the industry’s genesis and development, from the Waltham Black Act and its death penalties, to the list of ‘vermin’ cleared (193 wildcats, 246 pine martens, 48 otters, 27 white-tailed eagles, 15 golden eagles, 18 ospreys, 93 peregrine falcons, 275 kites, 83 hen harriers, and so on and so on). For me, it would have been nice to understand more of the rise (and eventual fall) of the Welsh grouse industry which at one time was so significant in Welsh land use — but you can’t tell every story. 

As I read, I didn’t feel a growing thesis bubbling up from most of Upland. But when it finally arrived in the ‘Mountain Futures’ chapter and epilogue, I found that the foundations for one had been solidly laid in previous chapters. As a collection of tales across time and place, Upland isn’t remotely didactic – it is a true history of the mountains we have before us today; denuded of nature, of people, of culture, and unable to hold the water and sustain lowland areas as they should — reduced to ‘drained bogs and toasted heaths’. Sublime shadows of what was, and could one day be again.

The author’s experiences of uplands transformed for the better during his lifetime offer a precious nugget of hope, in the restored forests of Carrifran, and the moorland plateaus of his boyhood stomps. In the plain truth that upland farming has changed many times before, and therefore can again. In the notion that the work of saving our uplands — of returning nature there — ‘can’t be left solely to charities and philanthropists’. I’ll drink to that.

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‘Upland: The Strange History and Vital Future of Britain’s Mountains’ by Ed Douglas is out now and available here, published by Bodley Head (£23.75).

Eben Myrddin Muse is an emerging writer and campaigner from Dyffryn Nantlle. In his work he explores land justice, Welshness, commons, and nature connection. He has written for The Welsh Agenda, Viewpoint and Climber Magazines, as well as being a regular contributor to UKClimbing.com. He works as a policy and campaigns officer for the British Mountaineering Council’s access and conservation team and is an ambassador for the Campaign for National Parks. Follow him on Substack, Instagram and Bluesky.