Book Review: The Sirens of Mars

A lot of new gardening and plant books have landed on my mat this spring, and I need to up my book reviewing game! I like to do them justice, and spend some time reading them before I write a review, so that does create a bit of a backlog. Right at the time when the garden is demanding my attention. Anyway, the book that has found itself at the top of the list is one that really encompasses the gardening zeitgeist – The Community Gardening Handbook, by Ben Raskin. I looked him up, and he has impeccable credentials. He’s currently Head of Horticulture for the Soil Association; prior experiences include working for Garden Organic, running a walled garden and being a Horticultural Advisor for the Community Farm near Bristol.

A couple of weeks ago, I was looking for some statistics about the average UK garden size, and I found some interesting ones. According to the 2015 media pack for the RHS The Garden magazine, a document that is aimed at attracting advertisers to the publication, the 380,000 RHS members the magazine is sent to have gardens that are 10 times larger than the UK average, covering over half an acre.

As 2016 draws to a close, my garden looks a lot different than it did last year. For starters, it has 12 raised beds now, instead of 6. There’s a small shed for storage, and a log store. There are gardener’s paths, an improved fence with fruit-training wires and small raised beds in the extra garden strip. I would not have got this far without Ryan’s endless energy and enthusiasm, his practical skills. And his dad. Whilst I am Head Gardener, Ryan is the garden’s Chief Engineer.

At the beginning of May this year, the UK media took note of an unusual case in Italy’s highest court – a homeless man originally found guilty of theft, and sentenced to six months in jail and a €100 fine, was acquitted. The new verdict determined that as he had only stolen a small amount of food because he was desperately hungry, he had not committed a crime.

I love books about weeds and wild plants – they generally contains little gems of fascinating information about useful and edible plants, tidbits you don’t find in gardening manuals. It’s been a while since I had the chance to sit down and peruse a good book, so it was great to be offered a review copy of Wonderful Weeds by Madeleine Harley, which has the subtitle “an extensive and fully illustrated guide from seedlings to fruit.”

The latest edition of Joy Larkcom’s classic, The Salad Garden, has been sitting on my ‘to review’ pile for some weeks now. It’s not that I didn’t want to read it – I did read it. It’s just that it’s extremely dense, in the sense that it contains a lot of useful information about a lot of useful plants. It’s not a book you can read quickly, digest, and move on from. It’s a reference manual that will be part of your collection for years. Forever, probably.

A little while ago, I told you about a preliminary experiment that Dr Wieger Wamelink and his team at the University of Wageningen conducted. It demonstrated that it is possible to grow plants in simulated Mars and Moon soils. 

If there is one thing I am truly grateful for during this extraordinary time, it’s my garden. Not only is it producing harvests for us and reducing our reliance on our over-stressed food system, but it’s somewhere we can step outside and be surrounded by nature, without having to worry about social distancing. 

I grew up understanding the phrase “a bit Heath Robinson” as meaning something that had been cobbled together, but I wasn’t really aware of the fact that Heath Robinson was a real person. Born in 1872, he was an English cartoonist and illustrator, and he became famous for drawings of convoluted contraptions – ridiculously complicated machines that achieved things you don’t need a machine for. It was in this capacity that ‘Heath Robinson’ entered the dictionary in 1912; he became more synonymous with cobbling things together during the ‘Make Do and Mend’ campaign of the Second World War. In fact, one of the automated analysis machines at Bletchley Park – a forerunner of the codebreaking Colossus – was named Heath Robinson in his honour.

Can we grow food on the Moon or Mars? That was the question that started Dr Wieger Wamelink, ecologist and exobiologist at the University of Wageningen in the Netherlands, on a research quest in 2013.

I haven’t been feeling well this week, so in lieu of eating food, I have been reading about it. A while ago, whilst I was pondering what a resilient UK garden would look like, blog reader Audrey asked me if I had read Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, which is somewhat of a classic in the local good genre. I hadn’t, so I bought a secondhand copy and started reading.

There’s a certainly delicious irony in the fact that my copy of Flattened Fauna: A field guide to common animals of roads, streets, and highways has become resolutely three-dimensional whilst I have been reading it. I couldn’t get it to flatten down for a photoshoot, even though “…in becoming part of the road fauna celebrated in this book, an animal loses not only its life but also its third dimension.”