S2 Episode 11 Offshoot A history of allotments
Lally Snow’s new book - My Family and Other Seedlings
One of the things I am really enjoying about making this podcast is the people I am meeting along the way and seeing how creative they are. Back in series one is the plant story about Anya’s Mint and I loved the conversation between Anya and war journalist Lally Snow. When I recorded that, Lally was deep in motherhood with three children under five, somehow finding the time to research the history of allotments for a new book which would be published in May 2024. So I said we would keep in touch. We did and here is the promised book!
What I hadn’t appreciated at the time was that she was also weaving the history with her own experiences of growing on an allotment for the first time. I have no idea how she found the time to be on the allotment and research and write and take care of her young family though she does say herself quite early on that getting to the end of the day with everyone still alive was the main achievement! I love the sign below that Lally has made for the new veg beds. And who needs a wheelbarrow for manure when you have a pram!
When I think of the history of allotments, the images I see in my mind are those history lessons with posters and propaganda from the two world wars when every spare scrap of land was turned into a patch to grow food. So parks, palace gardens, bomb craters were full of rows of vegetables. However in this episode Lally takes us back much further to the acts of land enclosure. There is also a hint at something we will be returning to which is detached gardens, a feature from the Victorian era where city dwellers with no garden could rent a small patch in which to put up a summer house and grow flowers, fruit trees and vegetables in an enclosed ‘garden’. I found some similar detached gardens known as allotment gardens in Stockholm last summer in the Tanto park. Not allotments as we know them in the UK but gardens with summer houses, separated by picket fences. Below are some pictures of these Swedish ‘allotments’. Later in the series I will be taking you to some ‘detached gardens’ with summer houses in the UK.
Radishes has been our first vegetable story and I do hope that it will not be our last. I am sure that there are other plant stories to be told from allotments. If you would like to share one then do get in touch - sally@ourplantstories.com.
And if you are looking for a lovely present for someone who loves their veg then both Lally’s book - My Family and Other Seedlings and Kathy Slack’s book - From the Veg Patch would make great gifts.