‘There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.’ Ernest Hemingway

A spell in hospital took me away from my research into soil for a while. It gave me an opportunity to reflect on the places I had been and the people I had met. It also gave me the chance to read more old books, written by people who had shared my interest in the land. What began to emerge was the realisation that just as I had felt compelled to make sandcastles, mud pies and jump in puddles as a child, so too had I felt drawn as I grew up to somehow make my living from the land.

I’d gone to agricultural college because I’d been happiest when milking cows, feeding pigs and driving tractors. The next ten years were spent in the sales and marketing team of a fertiliser manufacturer, which kept me close to the land. I fell for and married a farmer’s daughter, which then meant that whatever work I was doing, I was always in touch with the farming world. 

Later I realised that my desire to write was greater than my sense that I need to work the land in a practical way, and so what followed was a marketing career, writing words that influence others. Writing books about the land is where I now find myself, and that perhaps has always been where I was destined to be; it has just taken me a long while to get there.

People talk about hearing the call of the wild and the almost primal urge to leave civilisation in search of a more natural, elemental and grounded life. Too many of us now find ourselves remote from the natural world, perhaps living in a city flat, working in an office, eating processed food and wearing clothes made from synthetic fibres. It should not be surprising that many break free from such an artificial lifestyle in search of something more authentic.

While it is true to say that the last hundred years has seen the pace of technological and social change accelerate, taking us further and further from nature, people have always felt compelled to walk away from comfort and convenience to reconnect with the land. It is as if deep down, we have an instinctive need to live in harmony with our natural world. I’ve always been particularly interested in East Anglian rural writers and have been surprised by how many there have been over the past few hundred years.

Thomas Tusser is the earliest example I have found, of someone choosing to leave behind an easy life, to live closer to the land and then write about his experience. Born near Witham in Essex, it is thought in 1524, he had a privileged upbringing, becoming a chorister at St Paul’s in London before going to Eton College. This was a time when as few as one in ten could read and write, and only the wealthy sent their children to school.

His career got off to a promising start, when he joined the team of William Paget, one of Henry VIII’s most influential political advisors. For many, this would be a dream job, at the very centre of power with no doubt an envious network of contacts. Providing he toed the line and did not fall from favour, he would have been assured of a long, interesting and lucrative career. 

But I don’t think bureaucracy sat comfortably with him as he was also a budding poet, although none of his early poetry was ever published. His head will have told him to sit tight, keep his nose clean and look forward to a wealthy retirement, but his heart was drawing him to nature and the land. In around 1556, despite Paget’s protestations he gave it all up to and farm at Cattawade in Suffolk. Biographies of Tusser say that he married and started farming at the same time, which makes me suspect that like me, he married a farmer’s daughter. His book 100 Good Points of Husbandry was written from experience and proved to be a best seller when first published in 1557. So much so, that a sequel titled 500 Good Points of Husbandry quickly followed. Even then, publishers were not slow to push a writer for more if a first book sold well.

While his books were a great success, his farming was less so and he moved first to Ipswich, then Norfolk where he had another try at farming, then to London where he died in 1580. It is said that he died in poverty, but his legacy is his writing, and arguably he was the first to write authentically about life on the land in East Anglia. He launched a tradition that others, me included, have strived to continue.

A century after Tusser, John Mortimer, an affluent London trader who by the age of 43 had become wealthy as city merchant, also turned his back on London life and bought a country estate in Essex. Clearly he too wanted to experience the satisfaction of growing and harvesting crops, rather than just buying things from one man, then selling them at a profit to another. There is I’m sure some satisfaction to be had from making money, but for Mortimer, like Tusser, he wanted to connect with the land.

He too wrote a book; The Whole Art of Husbandry was first published in 1716 when he was 60 and had been farming for more than fifteen years. Unlike Tusser, he did not write his in verse, but it is packed with practical tips, suggesting that he was not afraid to get his hands dirty, rather than be a gentleman farmer who returns indoors once the morning’s orders have been given to the farm workers.

Perhaps better known for his adventure novels, Henry Rider Haggard, as I’ve already mentioned, also wrote an excellent and very descriptive book about farming, A Farmer’s Year in 1898. Born in Norfolk, he’d lived and worked in South Africa, before returning and marrying Louisa Margitson, who had inherited her family farm at Ditchingham. 

Interestingly, while he wrote the novels he is perhaps best remembered for, King Solomon’s Mines, She and Allan Quartermain in the 1880s, after he had written A Farmer’s Year a good proportion of his future writing was about rural affairs. Once he had found contentment living on a south Norfolk farm, he no longer needed to look further afield for excitement. For the rest of his life, he just wrote about rural affairs, although his last years were lived in London. Like Tusser, I think he earned more from writing than he did from farming.

In the 20^th century, Adrian Bell shocked his parents by leaving London in 1930 at the age of nineteen to learn how to farm. Unlike others I have mentioned, he continued hands-on farming for more than sixty years, writing books about his experiences along the way. He had an inquisitive nature and hungry mind, and thanks to an introduction made by his father, who was editor of The Observer, also compiled The Times crossword each week for nearly fifty years. This shows in his writing, which is particularly lyrical and rich.

You won’t have failed to notice that all of the examples I’ve given of people who chose farming over an easier life elsewhere were men. This is a stark reminder that until relatively recently, women had little opportunity to follow a career, let alone give up that career to farm. One notable exception is Lady Eve Balfour, who I mentioned in the last chapter. Not only did she became a farmer, but she also challenged the way farming was done, setting up the Soil Association because even in 1946, when fertiliser and herbicides were considered new and exciting, she could see that farming organically was more sustainable and so better for us all. 

But as I look back on these writers’ lives, most were born into wealthy families, most had the benefit of a good education, and most managed to farm, either because they had grown wealthy in an earlier career, or because they had married well. Their routes into farming were not ones many of us could follow, which makes their stories interesting, but frustrating because we cannot easily follow their example. And then I discovered and was moved by the 1973 book Self Sufficiency, written by the late John Seymour and illustrated by his wife Sally.

I was not alone; Seymour’s biographer Paul Peacock wrote: ‘Ever since I read The Fat of the Land I had considered myself his friend. More desperate a friend he never had. Reading The Fat of the Land brought me a companion who was living out a life of which I had only dreamed. If John could do it, why not me?’ 

The Peacocks visited the Seymours’ farm in Pembrokeshire shortly after John’s death, to seek the support of his daughters to write a biography of their father. They helped where they could and A Good Life was published in 2005. It is an insightful book, which tells both the story of a remarkable life, and the deep respect that Peacock had for both the man and his work. Paul Peacock had become an enthusiastic follower of Seymour’s path to self-sufficiency. As well as books about gardening, he also wrote books about keeping bees and chickens. Several of his books focused on growing food in a built-up area, and one, Nature’s Wild Harvest, on foraging. His wife Diana also wrote a number of books about preserving and cooking the products the couple grew.

I love Seymour’s simple and honest style of writing and can quite see how it motivated Paul Peacock to change the direction of his own life. In fact after writing about Seymour, Peacock went on to write thirty more books, charting his own journey in search of self-sufficiency. One was titled The Sausage Book and tells you everything you need to know about making sausages, apart that is, from how rear and kill your pig. For that you need Seymour’s Self Sufficiency. For many years Peacock also wrote a regular column for The Mirror, signing off each week as Mr Digwell. 

Talking with Peacock’s daughter Rebecca and his widow Diana I learned that he’d picked up a copy of Seymour’s book The Fat of the Land in a second-hand bookshop and found it captivating. Diana told me how it had changed her husband’s life, who as a botanist, had always been interested in growing food, but Seymour’s book had helped him realise that he could start with what he had, rather than wait until he could afford to buy more land. Seymour’s book showed how what he thought was impossible, was achievable straight away.

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Robert Ashton’s ‘Down to Earth’ is out now and available here, published by Wilton Square Books.

Robert will be appearing at the Leiston Book Festival on 19 September. 

Today, CBTR editor Diva Harris bites down through summer’s shared bounty of ripe fruit, hot red planets and abundant honesty stalls.

Read an excerpt from the piece below, and log in or subscribe via Steady to read in full.

^{Illustration: Adam Higton}

It would be remiss of me to pretend that summer has been easy to enjoy. Nothing makes me feel more deranged than a cheery allusion to the lovely weather, or rosé-tinted instagram post whose caption-writer wishes for a neverending summer, when for weeks, everything has been metaphorically and literally on fire.

As I sit down to write this, in the middle of a national park in the south west of England, three-quarters of the country is officially in drought. Out on the moor, gorse drier than bone, tinder, or anything else that is dry, we watch teenagers mucking about on 2-stroke motorbikes. A bolt of anxiety rockets through me when B says that 2-strokes are notorious for spitting out sparks. The pond at the top of the hill is empty and fissured; its earth smells scorched. The sheep who normally drink from it sit in its cracked bowl, confused. The reliable moorland spring trickles to a stop.

The balance of life is delicate and it swings precariously, delirious in the heat. How am I supposed to derive pleasure from a violently hot summer in which the mushrooms spring from the ground and go over, the blackberries and apples ripen and fall in June and July and August? What will the birds and snails eat in September and October?

All is fraught, but all is not lost.

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^{‘Abbey Dore, old elm, 1923’ by Alfred Watkins, courtesy of Herefordshire Libraries and herefordshirehistory.org.uk.}

The first mistake is to believe that humans are the apex species. This is the worst kind of fatalism.

There is a difference between being an owner and being a custodian and it is not possible to be both.

The commonwealth once stolen by legislation, force, and murder can be reclaimed and reparations made.

The lord and landowner will be compensated for their loss in the same manner that the peasant and small holder were compensated for the loss of the commons.

Observe the connectivity and mutual aid practiced by boundary oaks. 

Let the beaver be your totem and navigator.

The countryside belongs to all beings, the seen and the unseen. The countryside belongs to everyone and no one.

That some things remain hidden from sight is proof that our senses are limited, so decisions about nature should not be based on our narrow perceptions of reality.

Nothing is as it appears. 

It is possible for harmony to be spread equally over the meadows, heaths, and woodlands to each accordingly.

When stepping beyond the garden gate enlist the company of a dog, if a wolf is unavailable, they can sense realms that most humans have forgotten how to access. What was once forgotten can be remembered with prompting.

There is no such thing as trespass.

The farmer with his pesticides is not our friend. The farmer has kidnapped the countryside and must return it. The hour is already late and the ransom has been paid times over.

Free yourself from agricultural tyranny and propaganda.

The countryside has forever been made and unmade. It came be remade again.

The enchantment has always walked by our side. 

We’d left the car in a cul-de-sac off the North Norfolk coast road at Burnham Deepdale and followed a footpath between houses. Labrador Eddie ran on ahead, the promise of a swim enough to maintain his excitement. There was a messy, cluttered sky, clouds daubed here, scraped there. West, the Norfolk Coast Path takes you behind what are mainly holiday homes today, down to the harbour at Brancaster Staithe. East, the path rises onto a grassy, flat-topped trapezoid which serves to corral the sea, and eventually leads to another little creek-side harbour at Burnham Overy Staithe. I understand the necessities of sea defences, but they remain a mere addendum to landscape, a pallid caricature of the saltmarsh’s hidden labyrinth of channels, sweeping curves, hooks and inflections; a rationalist obstacle to the cursive, organic design of nature’s architecture. I paused briefly at this Anthropocenic crossroads and set off, not along the limen of humankind’s influence, but north, towards the heart of the saltmarsh, beyond which I could see the dunes of Scolt Head Island blocking my view to the sea.

The last time I wrote for CBTR I was in the north-west Highlands where the landscape speaks in epochs, and time inches along on tectonic plates. Scolt Head Island and Assynt seem irreconcilable as landscapes, antithetical in processes and time. Scolt is an example of what geomorphologists call an offshore barrier island, and it’s remarkably young in geological terms. There’s a debate as to its exact age, but the island we know today has perhaps existed for as little as 1,000 years. I’ve known the island as a permanent part of the landscape in my consciousness for three decades, but it’s difficult to conceptualise it within a timescale attributable to landscape features. There’s a Roman fort nearby, but the Romans were gone from there, and the rest of the UK, maybe half a century before the island’s first shingles were deposited. Around the time of the oldest estimate, Harold was defeated at Hastings. And only a century before that Æthelstan unified the Anglo-Saxons – Scolt Head Island may be the same age as England itself.

Heading north from the coast path we were soon on saltmarsh, and a short while later facing our first creek crossing. Eddie found thicker, cloying mud, and it soon squelched between my toes. A thumb-stick of some sort is a good idea on the marsh as it gives you extra leverage when extricating yourself from the knee-deep sections. The remnants of the tide were still being drained away at the bottom of the creek as a spoonbill passed right to left, in level flight, trailing lanky legs.

Once across, the path was less visible. The sea had left its lukewarm remnants in depressions and had filled footprints. Either side of the path tide pools – irregularly shaped, vegetation-free cut-outs randomly pockmarked across the face of the marsh – were brimming. Last week, before the spring tides, they’d been empty, filled with crazed patterns of mud. Thousands of sun-bleached, fingernail-sized crabs were caught like stars in galaxies of dried weed. The path continued alongside the Nod, a raised area of cord grasses and suaeda bushes. The Nod is high enough that your feet might have stayed dry at the top of the last tide. A National Trust sign jauntily displayed its ‘No Camping’ dogma. Perhaps they could incorporate this motif into letterheads and car stickers – The National Trust (No Camping).

Roger Deakin swam through one of the chapters of his book Waterlog at nearby Holkham. An inveterate water-lover, Deakin swam in the moat of the Elizabethan house in Suffolk he rebuilt himself, and described breaking down in a Tesco car park at the indignities suffered by the river Lark, funnelled through concrete for mere convenience. Inspired by John Cheever’s short story ‘The Swimmer’, he had the wonderful notion of swimming through Britain ‘To follow the rain on its meanderings… to break out of the frustration of a lifetime of doing lengths.’ Deakin considered swimming, walking and cycling to be subversive, nonconformist in their simple freedoms. Waterlog brims with obvious satisfaction in denying orthodoxy and officialdom, in a rejection of rules, exigencies and ‘No Camping’ signposts. He also had, if you’ll pardon the contradiction, a healthy disregard for health and safety. He went further east and swam at Stiffkey, just beyond Holkham, crossing Cabbage Creek on his way to the saltmarsh there. I imagine he would have been just as frustrated as the locals when in 2022 the National Trust, without warning, removed the bridge over the creek. This effectively cut off locals from the saltmarsh where for generations they’ve swum, birdwatched, picked samphire and cockles, fished or shot wildfowl, enjoying one of the county’s last, truly wild places. Not long afterwards a new, less permanent-looking, bridge appeared. Locals insisted it was the work of the faeries (the ones with access to planks and scaffold poles). A running battle then ensued while the National Trust cogitated for a year about cost, planning permission and feasibility. Each time an unofficial bridge was removed the faeries, under cover of darkness, would build another. Eventually sanity reigned and the bridge over Cabbage Creek was replaced. Roger Deakin died in 2006 after a short illness. I sort of think he would have preferred to use the faerie bridges. 

Saltmarsh remains one of the few truly wild habitats we have in lowland Britain. It has neither the glamour nor attraction of uplands or mountains and is, understandably, much less frequented. Saltmarsh is a landscape of beyond, both physically and metaphorically, lying out of reach of our collective imagination. 

Of course, The National Trust does heroic work protecting our heritage and it’s partly thanks to them, as well as geography, that Scolt remains isolated and mostly untouched. In 1923 they bought the island for £500 with an additional £100 toward construction of a ‘hut.’ The hut was built to house the ‘The Watcher.’ Overturning this sinister-sounding epithet, the first Watcher was Emma Turner. Writer, ornithologist and pioneering wildlife photographer, she described herself as a vagabond of the reeds, living aboard a boat in the Norfolk Broads. Her photograph of a young bittern, neck and bill extended skyward, remains a beautiful image to this day. In geomorphologist J.A. Steers’s 1933 book Scolt Head Island, she wrote about Scolt’s need for protection. Apparently, tern eggs were regularly stolen for ‘domestic purposes.’ In 1922 there were 17 pairs of common terns. That number rose to 800 by the end of her two-year tenure. I came across the ‘formidable woman’ trope in several places while researching Emma Turner. She regarded her position as ‘nothing to make a fuss about,’ but that there was a fuss seems clear. The press labelled her ‘The Loneliest Woman in England,’ which she described as ‘misguided enthusiasm.’ My personal inclination is reinforcing stereotypes is never helpful, even where times, values and attitudes are out of sync. In the twenties a woman alone in this position would obviously have attracted comment, but I see no reason to reinforce such anachronisms today.

After another kilometre or so, having hopped a few small gutters that intersected the path, we reached the edge of Norton Creek. This channel gives Scolt its island status and is the most intimidating part of getting there. It was a spring tide, the highest of the month, which may seem counterintuitive when planning to cross a tidal channel on foot. The thing about spring tides though is that, as well as advancing higher on the incoming tide, they retreat lower on the ebb. This large dynamic range means it’s the ideal point in the tidal cycle to cross. However, it’s important to remember tides are wont to do the unexpected. Times and heights are predicted, not actual. Weather patterns at sea can mean tides significantly higher, earlier, or later than expected, however benign conditions appear. Although there is a right of way to the island, and in places it’s easily identifiable, it isn’t advisable to attempt crossing without some local knowledge.  

Two and a half hours before low tide Eddie and I crossed Norton Creek, which runs west to east here, and east to west from the opposite end. Tide-meet must be somewhere in the middle, something to experience on the kayak at some point. A large crescent of mud is split by a tide-formed course four or five-feet deep leading north from the marsh for fifty yards or so to the bigger channel. Norton Creek opens into Brancaster Harbour, a large area of water protected by the outlying sand banks of Scolt’s western end. Caught between the light breeze and what was left of the current, a weathered blue dinghy circled its mooring buoy indecisively. With phone and camera in a waterproof backpack I wasn’t too concerned with how deep it was, although in the end it only reached my waist. Eddie was soon out of his depth and swimming. The channel bed is sand, which can be soft in places, and is sculpted into deep, uneven scallops which would have upended me a couple of times but for my trusty stick. We emerged below another National Trust sign confirming where we were. A couple of redshanks took flight, their pinging alarm calls echoing across the marsh.

The best way to get to Scolt is the ferry from Burnham Overy Staithe. When tide and weather align, a jolly armada of dinghies, ex-Norfolk crab-boats and other assorted vessels can also be found readying themselves for the short voyage to the eastern end. Picnic hampers are stowed, sails flap eagerly in the breeze, halyards ting-ting-ting impatiently against mastheads, outboard motors idle contentedly. Gradually, as moored boats lift and swing into the current, the flotilla sets sail. Some adventurous souls catch the ferry, then follow the island’s long spine of dunes, or its deserted beach, and join the footpath which starts, or ends depending on your perspective, near the hut. 

When we left the water and traversed the muddier banks up onto the island itself, bands of vegetation were formed in ranks. First, scattered, livid-green stalks of samphire whose clumps band together to form larger collections of plants about five inches high. Samphire is high on the saltmarsh forager’s menu. Boiled, with ground pepper and a poached egg, you’ve got yourself an eight or nine quid starter in local pubs. Many a tourist has paid through the nose for this delicacy while sitting not far from the chef’s free supply. Then the close-formed, pale pastel-greens of sea purslane, another marsh plant that crops up on menus. 

On the island I made out a faint path leading north-westerly to follow, keeping a crescent of low dunes to our right. Up to the first channel we’d negotiated, the path was wide as a lane, and well-walked, while beyond it noticeably less well-trafficked and, once on the island, it ghosted in and out. Probably this represents the uninitiated marsh-goer’s bravado as they venture further from the mainland. The mud and the multiple channel crossings can make what seemed like a good idea at the time a less attractive proposition, while at the back of your mind is the ominous idea of the incoming tide.

According to J.A. Steers’s 1933 map of the island, we’d crossed onto Butcher’s Beach, with Missel Marsh to our left. Although there’s no beach now this recurve of dunes, which hook south-west then sweep back under themselves, would once have been Scolt’s most westerly point, now a couple of kilometres away. From an aerial view these recurves hang from the island like a row of Moorish scimitars. This one was well-fortified by a belt of waist-high suaeda bushes. A salt-tolerant perennial, it’s advisable to take care moving through them due to the rough, woody branches hidden below their foliage. Last year I met two ladies walking from the ferry whose shins were a mass of scratches and dripping blood after falling foul of the suaeda. 

A low valley opened between dunes. We followed it, carefully, and emerged onto Hut Marsh. It was vibrant with colour. Most of the sea lavender had gone over, but here bumblebees still laboured amongst the purple flowers. Conversely, the samphire had started to turn, its flickering red spread across the marsh like an East Anglian dawn. Perched in the dunes above us was the original Watcher’s hut, but there was one more channel to cross. Waist deep, vertically sided, as if cut by navvies, the bottom was filled with cold, crystal-clear water pouring from the marsh over sand and pebbled riffles. It looked more chalk-stream than saltmarsh. These shingles form the bones of the island, onto which dunes and marsh are deposited grain by grain, sediment by sediment. Pioneer plants then follow, trapping further deposits, knitting grains into dunes and sediment into marsh. 

We ate lunch on the hut steps where Emma Turner must have done, a hundred years before, looking back across Hut Marsh to the last, low roll of chalk hills we’d driven over a few hours ago. I couldn’t help but think of American poet Gary Snyder’s list poem ‘Things to do around a lookout,’ written while he worked as a fire lookout on Sourdough Mountain, and wondered whether Emma Turner had similar moments of ennui. Reading her 1928 book Birdwatching on Scolt Head Island, I don’t think she would have had time for boredom or melancholy. She had five terriers to keep her company and was never really alone for very long anyway – ten days the longest. Regular supplies were brought from the mainland, and many curious visitors in the first weeks and months of her tenure. Today there’s a modern equivalent of the hut further west where the now more prosaically-named wardens monitor the terns, but the hut is still used by visiting researchers.

We left the hut and climbed through blackberries shrivelled by drought. The dunes above must be three stories high at their peak, and the entire length of the island is visible from them. We ran down the steep, north facing dunes onto the beach, gaining momentum to that point where it feels like you’re trying to catch up with yourself, and you have to keep accelerating or it’s head-over-heels the rest of the way. On the beach, a group of cormorants were resting on the sand, drying their wings in the sun. Otherwise, birdlife was scarce, and I didn’t actually see a single tern. I sat with my back against a low dune with a flat edge sheered off by the sea, and watched the clouds slowly dissipating.

We didn’t sit for long. Unlike Emma Turner I didn’t have a system of flags to hoist in an emergency and, with an incoming tide to beat, it was soon time to leave.

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You can follow Danny’s occasional landscape photography Instagram page here.

Find an extract from the interview below.

^{Alycia Pirmohamed, photographed by Tim Phillips}

Firstly, some quick-fire questions.

So much of the book is about your walking journeys, whether in Canada or Mallorca the Lake District. Can you tell us if there are particular trails which have been essential to your writing life, or brought you key moments of redirection or realisation? 

Not so much a trail, but a particular walk: the loop around Lochend Park near where I live. When I was living on Easter Road, specifically during lockdown, I went to Lochend Park almost every day. This little loop, with its swans and coots and herons, is where I started my project of reading a poem by a South Asian woman out loud every day of Ramadan. I’m not sure if I could name any specific epiphany that came through, but the walk itself did feel spiritual in a way that I sometimes feel disconnected from, being so far away from the religious community I grew up with.

Something more unusual about the book is its focus on friendship. You write about being with people ‘in a way that is embodied and slow and woven with care.’ Is this something you feel is missing from the nature writing genre? 

I came to writing from a very community-oriented perspective, through online forums and peer-to-peer workshops. And I feel like friendship and community are essential to both the writing I do, to the process itself, and to why it matters to me at all. Perhaps historically, in the Western tradition specifically, the lone explorer was a common narrative in nature writing. And sometimes writing itself can feel like a solitary act, even a lonely one. But I think most of what I’ve read lately focuses on collaboration, intertextuality and friendship of various kinds. I’ve also been really buoyed by the kinds of collaborative writing I’ve seen in the nature writing field. A great example of this is Dialect Press’s imprint DIRT, where poets create eco-critical work together. And I write a little bit about this too is a glistening in Shorelines, which is a pamphlet I co-wrote with Pratyusha, Nina Mingya Powles, and Jessica J. Lee over a magical weekend of cooking, walking, and swimming in lakes in Germany.

In the book, you write: ‘I find the image of the wayward seed compelling, but I’m also distraught by it.’ The question of home is a preoccupation of the book, but clearly one of the guiding questions of your life too. I was wondering if the process of writing the book helped you to come to some new conclusions, whether it gave you closure on where it is you belong?

I think writing Shorelines did both: the writing process helped me come to some conclusions, some certainties, but it also freed up more questions about place, about self, and about what it means to live within the diaspora. These questions are so valuable because they help me to remember that my perception of self, and my feelings around home, are constantly shifting as I myself change and as the political context changes. And that’s okay. Sometimes, I feel adamant that a place, like Scotland, is my home. And then, I wake up to news of race riots and Islamophobic attacks, and those feelings rupture, they cause so much pain. I recently revisited Bhanu Kapil’s How to Wash a Heart and felt very seen by the way she portrays the host-guest complex as enacted by nations and institutions. I needed that book again. Shorelines itself transformed a lot from proposal to publication. I originally thought I’d write a book focused on poetry criticism and the fricative feelings I’d had around the word ‘belonging.’ I’m so hesitant about that word in the publishing industry, and wanted to write about how, as a theme, it seemed like shorthand for books by racialised writers, a way for the white gaze to easily categorise and digest our work. And while some of that friction, that complexity and confusion exists in the work, I think one of the conclusions I came to is that I didn’t want to only write to or against these narratives all the time. I wanted to just be, and to let my exploration surprise me too.

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Alycia Pirmohamed’s ‘Shorelines: Memory, migration and the selves we become’ is out now and available here, published by Canongate. Read an extract here.

Just for one day

…in May
Morning is breaking, otherworldly and familiar. Screaming swifts descended from their nocturnal heights slash the first rays fired from the horizon that skim the rooftops and ignite the ash crowns a hot tangerine. Their bladed wings glint in the new blue like sky lures as if teasing monsters below in the dark yet to yield; from which the blinding bright trill of a freshened wren pierces the slouching deep shade with its syringe-sharp syrinx, injecting liquid rippling frisson into the new day; into my nape, the back of my skull. I want to scream a reply, yes wren, yes! The shrieking of the swifts like an eternal summer sound-thread continuously suturing time and place, nature and civilisation; above caves, cliffs, ancient cities, medieval roofs, to now, still just a few hanging on, over my garden, my city.

In the cool soothing air absolutely nothing moves if not disturbed by a bird; not a single leaf, even in the crowns. A jay drops out of nowhere onto the tit box at the back. It is nesting, like one of John Clare’s Rude boys, who in this case knows where to look. It leans over, stretches to peer with its sociopathic reptilian eyes — checking with one then swapping its stance to check with the other — into the nest hole hoping to catch the greediest chick that mistakes the sound of it landing for another food delivery. A creche of starling fledglings rasp from the guttering up above sounding a little like warming up cicadas promising another hot day. Cock sparrow is attentively fertilising his wife in the grape vine that entwines Sparrow Bush. They are lit for all to see by a shaft of sun squeezing through the gap down the side of the house. They were delivering new feathers to the nest just before. It’ll be their second brood. Blackbird is tutting from somewhere near. I don’t see him in the garden so much, he needs lawns. The tight fists of new hogweed umbels unclench in the warm rays that now clip some of them. A mosquito looking for fresh warm blood — mine — bobs apprehensively inches above my forearm. It is right to be nervous. It’s the shock wave of the slap that knocks it out of the air, I see it fall like a miniature icarus but can’t find the crash site.

As the sun rises the nettle tops seem to start burning, as if lit by magnifying glass, the flames invisible. The little backlit puffs of pollen look like smoke exhaled in niggling muffled coughs by nervous smokers — they are clearly forced somehow. Among the catkin-looking flower heads tiny orb webs made by the new crop of garden spiderlings glisten. Translucent little juicy green blobs of aphids that fatten blue tit and sparrow chicks, are beaded along the stems nominally protected by the plant’s hypodermic spikes pinging bright like glass splinters. Strange red and black ladybird pupal ‘pods’ lay like alien aphid traps adhered to some of the leaves as I search for tiny red admiral eggs. The blackcap drops a tune.

Insect activity gets underway as the sunlight penetrates deeper into the vegetation, shattering perspective and dimension into a mosaic of dappled light and shade from which the first speckled wood, whose pale yellow and buff brown wing patterns mirror the effect, launches an attack on a passing coal tit fledgeling. A heavy white tailed bumble bee, still woozy in the cool temperature, crash lands on a bramble bloom that immediately collapses in pink petals, the bee falling with them as if through floorboards, to join the heart-shaped feral rose petals shrivelling like giant snowflakes into brown burnt slush on the patio slabs around my chair. Green viewed whites flit in and out of sun pools that now hum continuously in bee frequency. An erratic rust-coloured moth stumbles into a ray cutting across the cow parsley — now gone to seed — and gets mugged by the speckled wood. It drops out of the sky into the umbelifer canopy as if it was avoiding a bat. A long deep red matchstick with delicate filigree wings helicopters cautiously onto the miniature crane-head seed pod of herb robert, its delicate lobed leaves now the same colour as the damsel fly. A sign of nutrient stress.

While I’m in the kitchen brewing another coffee the robin lands on the sill of the open window. By the way its head is poised it is obvious it has spotted one of the very camouflaged orange tip caterpillars — seventeen at the last count — in one of the bunches of garlic mustard in old gherkin jars on the window ledge. It flees as I walk up to it. Checking, I spot the first caterpillar already leaning back from a stem, poised like a question mark, held by thin silk belt, as it slowly pumps itself up to split open and wriggle out of its last catsuit of skin, revealing its new look as a pupa. As I step back out into the slowly warming peace a crow is cawing agitatedly, the familiar call that crows make at the sight of a raptor. Almost unbelievably it’s a buzzard. As it swerves and ducks the relentless harassment the sun catches the beautifully barred silken primaries. It’s the first I’ve seen this far ‘in town’. A buzzard over this garden! Wild.

The neighbours are awake; barking dogs, loud speak and cigarette smoke once again officially mark the end of the transcendental dawn. The transition actually happens undetected, something to do with light and background noise; the passing of the hypnotic, magical and miraculous into the scary familiar of another morning, and another potentially temperature-record-breaking day.

…in June
The shade yet to dissolve, the sun yet to reach the back of the garden, but already it is warm enough for the red admiral refuelling in the exploding buddleia under which I’m sitting to return repeatedly to the moribund nettle patch, to search for a decent leaf to lay another egg on. It is joined by a comma. A pair of fledged robins bounce around the patio with the same motion as a ping-pong ball dropped inches above the slabs. From the thin joins between ooze dandelions that look like strange green starfish. Plenty of moisture still underneath the paving.

The wood pigeon couple purr sedatively from deep in Ivy Tower. It’s a groan sounding like some melodious stomach rumbling. Rose ringed parakeets in the ashes screech gratingly loud and vulgar. Hard to find, they are the same green as the lanceolate leaves. The evocative call of a distant wood pigeon is answered by one of the pair above me. Swifts scream joy like fairground goers. Otherwise dawn is much quieter, the passerine choir syrinx sore and worn out. The figwort flowers right next to me stare like little burgundy and yellow miss kitty emojis.

A sunbeam finds a straight line through the house, as if it found the windows left open for it. Into which, inches in front of me, an amber glowing speck materialises momentarily then disappears, then rematerialises two feet higher. Then under my big toe as if hanging from it. Next it’s six feet above me. I’m mind blown by the tiny spiderling traversing huge space by invisible means. Dropping on an invisible bungee elastic, ascending in micro jerks an invisible rope, the illusion revealed only by the occasional iridescent flash of its micron-thick silk line swinging imperceptibly across the narrow ray. Can it feel, with its microscopic hooked feet on the silk strand, the aircraft roaring high across the blue abyss, the violent slaps and deadening thuds of pigeon wings against pigeon breast, hard enough to dislodge feathers, of the stare crazed woodies brawling violently in the ash over sparrow bush; can it feel my breath? Can it detect the carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides, aerosols and soot particle emissions falling on us both? Maybe some stick to its web?

The temperature rises. The thick air now rank with the corrupting nose-burning scent mix of jasmine and vulpine musk. At the base of Ivy Tower a steady hyper-slow snow fall of jasmine petals, replacing those of the feral rose, thawing into crisp slush. I stare into the orange sun-blazed canopy of a million lighter-flame leaves against which the blue of the sky is intense. After twenty seconds I shut my eyes to see the psychedelic negative. The burn creeps down the boles evaporating the shadows and ignites the waist-high jungle of umbellifers, buttercups, ox-eye daisies, knapweeds, meadow sweet, mallows and thistles. A speckled wood that has been sitting closed wing on a bramble leaf, peeping at me with its forewing eye, suddenly launches out over the hogweed saucers that recede down the garden, rising as if to hurdle the old wooden swings frame. He and his rival lock in combat and spin relentlessly in a mini vortex of rising heat.

Around the moment the sun reaches its zenith a sudden gentle gust of the Peckerwood mistral nudges the ash tops; the hazel leaves flap pathetically, the thorn bushes shiver. The heated breeze wafts the warm pig-piss odorant from the hogweed, on the clustered floreted plates of which there is now frenetic insect activity: houseflies, hoverflies, assorted Hymenoptera. The temperature is peaking at fucking hot, unbearable. To unshaded eyes the garden jungle now a blinding, retina-damaging phantasmagorical kaleidoscope of green: dull green, dark green; matt green, saturated green, bright green; bleached, glaring,
translucent, phosphorescent, neon, chlorophyllic. Haloed small and green veined white butterflies fluttering among it all in search of non wilting mustard leaves to deposit their eggs under add to the disorientating dazzling brilliance.

Ox-eye daisies droop flaccidly under the direct sun, I can’t remember ever seeing hang-headed ox-eyes. Among the softer foliage leaves hang limp, alarmingly, like wet flannels. Some are already scorched beyond revival. They won’t perk up once returned to the shade of the trees by the sun as it continues its arc across the deceiving blue. Other species are safe now, they successfully raced to seed like the runt poppy on the patio that didn’t even bother with leaves, just the reproduction ‘bits.’ Job done.

The afternoon is too hot to sit outside. Relentless oppressive heat, air dead still and without breath. As I get up to go in I catch sight of the first gatekeeper butterfly over the hard-headed knapweed flowers. It is the last species — bar one very rare and not counting second ‘brooders’ — to emerge in the year. It is not a loud or extravagant species; it would be insulting to call it a small brown job, but its appearance is as significant as the arrival of the first swifts that scream summer. A butterfly equivalent of a blackcap, quintessential creature of the hedgerow. Its presence in the garden a bit of a mystery, it was here before
its ‘feralling.’ Nothing quietly shouts summer’s peak, high summer, than gatekeepers flitting up and down dusty lanes, over parched grass gone to seed, over bramble domes.

…in July
Three species of blow flies write invisible nonsense in frenzied calligraphy inches above the fetid mucilaginous slick tinselled in slug slime that was vented or regurgitated last night on a patio slab before settling to gather around the remaining solids — bee torsos, moth wings and other unidentifiable insect integument — to syphon the nutritional sustenance before the sun of another 30°C plus day dry seals it beyond benefit. Was it the cat’s or the fox’s?

I only recently realised that I often share the rejuvenating morning peace with the vixen. I spook her yet again from her Moses basket of flattened, cane-coloured cow parsley stems on the way to the compost bins. As she flees, crashing through the brittle umbellifers, she dislodges the seed in showers that sound like dry rain falling on the crisped leaves and mosaically shattered ground. The baked earth like a firing gone wrong. I reach the compost bin, lift the lid releasing a hot putrid funk from a rancid soup of fermentation and decomposition. A fruit fly’s heaven. On the rim, a threatening leap of big slimy carnivorous leopard slugs, four of them. I pull up some of the garlic mustard whose completely desiccated leaves could almost be supermarket-own-brand cereal, to add to the peelings and trimmings before I replace the lid. A posse of twittering long tailed tits suddenly surround sound me. As I look for them among the thorn bushes I catch sight of the big sloes that I could see from the kitchen when they were pale green and obvious. They are now deep burgundy and purple, and big, and tempting. I pick one, put it in my mouth and squash it, already wincing at the expectation of its dry astringent singeing bitterness. There are kilos of them pulling down the branches. They are not sloes. I was always suspicious of two of the blackthorns I ordered a few years ago! But I’m sure they were sloes last year! Now they are deliciously moist and sweet despite their size. Prunus cerasifera — cherry plums, or some hybrid with prunus spinosa. I gratefully accept the unexpected bounty is a reciprocal gift from this liberated space and fill a colander with them leaving plenty for the community: feathered, furred, exoskeletal.

Back in my chair I watch the confused cat follow, with intense concentration, helping it along with its paw, a green bush cricket with its scimitar blade ovipositor hopping like an emergent froglet towards the nettle bed, which is now a scorched disaster zone. Shrivelled crisped leaves glazed with the crusted slime of desperate garden snails. Equally desperate commas and red admirals have repeatedly visited the patch to deposit their tiny indistinguishable ribbed eggs on any remaining green leaves. I’ve collected a
good few.

I look away from the screen. The cat is at the window. From his jaw protrudes a long stiff little leathery tail, a pair of skinny little hind legs kicking fruitlessly, the wood mouse still running. He looks at me with contempt, “yes I have another one.” I was watching Afternoons of Solitude by Albert Serra. An unflinching full gamut portrayal of bull fighting: its absolute extremes of ritual and tradition, twisted reverence; unfathomable cruelty and sadism; breathtaking beauty and appalling brutality. Suddenly the smears of the mouse’s blood on the concrete slab is the same as the smears of the blood of the murdered bull dragged away
still kicking across the sand of the ring. Cormac McCarthy said “In the Spaniard’s heart is a great yearning for freedom, but only his own. A great love for truth and honour in all its forms, but not in its substance. And a deep conviction that nothing can be proven except that it be made to bleed. Virgins, bulls, men.” It’s not just the Spanish is it? Don’t we all know by now, it’s all of us. Tomorrow Spain will play a corrupted game against Argentina and I will march yet again — AGAIN — in stifling record-breaking heat with thousands of good decent people against a genocide. A GENOCIDE. All is connected.

The cat runs off with his prey as I slide open the patio glass door. I switch on the outside light. I’m genuinely surprised by the sheer amount of moths ghosted in the heady glare, dancing, levitating around the buddelia cones as if without gravity. Even with the city’s light pollution stars are visible, twinkling in the hot clear night sky, billions of years old light that has only just reached, some of which from stars that no longer exist, they burned up.

In a few days I leave for a burning Mediterranean.

*

Mark Mattock. Artist. Photographer. Publisher. Rabbit Fighter. @the_rabbit_fighters_club

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?

*

‘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.