Rhapsody in Green by Charlotte Mendelson

£9.99
Available
Product Ref. (e.g. ISBN, SKU)
9780857839473
Published:
25 Mar 2021
Format:
Paperback
Number of pages:
240 pages
Dimensions:
196x126x22mm
Weight:
0.215kgs
Gardening can be viewed as a largely pointless hobby, but the evangelical zeal and camaraderie it generates is unique. Charlotte Mendelson is perhaps unusually passionate about it. For despite her superficially normal existence, despite the fact that she has only six square metres of grotty urban soil and a few pots, she has a secret life. She is an extreme gardener, an obsessive, an addict. And like all addicts, she wants to spread the joy.

'Excellent book.' Nigella Lawson

'Charming, inspiring, uplifting... pure lovely.' Marian Keyes

'Read Rhapsody in Green. A novelist's beautiful, useful essays about her tiny garden.' India Knight

'Glorious...for anyone who loves fruit, vegetables, herbs and language. It makes you see them with new eyes.' Diana Henry

'A witty account of 'extreme allotmenteering' for all obsessive gardeners' Mail on Sunday

'An extremely entertaining and inspiring story of one woman's passionate transformation of a small, irregular shaped urban garden into a bountiful source of food.' Woman & Home

'A gardening book like no other, this is the author's 'love letter' to her garden. She relays warm and witty stories about the trials and tribulations throughout her gardening year.' Garden News

'...this inspirational, funny book, written by someone who hankers after a homesteader's lifestyle, will make you look at even your window box in a new, more productive light.' The Simple Things

'Gardening is not a hobby but a passion: a mess of excitement and compulsion and urgency and desire. Those who practise it are botanists, evangelists, freedom fighters, midwives and saboteurs; we kill; we bleed. No, I can't drop everything to come in for dinner; it's a matter of life and death out here.'

Novelist Charlotte Mendelson has a secret life. Despite owning only six square metres of urban soil and a few pots, she is an extreme gardener; the creator of a tiny but bountiful edible jungle. And like all enthusiasts, she will not rest until you share her obsession.

This is the story of an amateur gardener's journey to addiction: her attempts to buy lion dung from London Zoo and to build her own cold frame; her disinhibited composting and creative approach to design; her prejudices (roses, purple flowers, people with orchards); and her passions: quinces, salad-leaves, herbs, Japanese greens and ancient British apples. It is a story of where fantasy meets reality, of the slow onset of a consuming love and, most of all, of how gardening, however peculiar, can save your life.

About the Author: Charlotte Mendelson's first novel, Love in Idleness, was published in 2001. Her second, Daughters of Jerusalem (2003) won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the Somerset Maugham Award. Her third, When We Were Bad (2007), was shortlisted for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction. Almost English (2013), her fourth, was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize.

More Information
Number of pages 240

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