What I Do With My Lavender Harvest

'A Rewilding Britain Landscape’ by Urquhart & Hunt at Chelsea in 2022

I SAW NEWS of a new book called “Pressed Plants” recently, and it got me thinking about my grandmother and one of the many crafts she enjoyed way back when. Grandma made what she called “pressed-flower pictures,” bits of her garden that she carefully dried, arranged on fabric and framed under glass. And some of those still hang on my walls. It also got me thinking of the 500-year-old tradition of pressing plants for science and the herbarium world.

Every month this year I’ve been trying to read one of the unread books on my shelf, and to then decide whether it gets to keep its spot or needs to be set free to find a new home. For June I chose Nature’s Wild Harvest by Eric Soothill and Michael J. Thomas. It was published in 1983, and has been sitting on my bookshelf for three years, since I bought it in our local secondhand bookshop (which only opens on Wednesdays).

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 I type this I’m waiting for a very exciting delivery. It’s not Santa I’m expecting, but UPS, bringing me the proofs of my new book. It has undergone a slight name change since I last mentioned it – The Small Harvest Handbook: Vol.1 is now The Small Harvest Notebook: Vol. 1. I’m told this is both modest and ‘unassumingly British’, but it feels more in keeping with the book – which is a step on the road towards developing a beautiful and productive kitchen garden and doesn’t pretend to be the only gardening book you’ll need on your shelf.

I’ve always been fascinated by the Home Front, the enlistment of every man, woman and child in the British Isles in an effort to beat Hitler through food rationing, making do and mending, salvage, growing your own and basically making the most of scarce resources with elbow grease and endless ingenuity. I’ve just read Eggs or Anarchy by William Sitwell, a biography of Lord Woolton who was the Minister of Food for much of the Second World War. He was in charge of ensuring everyone got fed, and improving nutritional standards was one of his aims. It’s unusual to get the ‘behind-the-scenes’ view, and the political situation wasn’t as united as may appear from our rose-tinted histories.

A little while ago I was talking about the recent extended period in my life when, for a variety of reasons, I was unable to garden. As it happens, I have been reading The Resilient Gardener, by Carol Deppe, which is subtitled “Food production and self-reliance in uncertain times”.

A seed potato is a potato that has been grown to be replanted to produce a potato crop. It’s the usual way that potatoes are made available to farmers and growers – although it is possible to produce potato seeds (also known as True Potato Seed, TPS), it is unusual to do so.

An ethnobotany superhero by night, my mild-mannered daytime alter ego is a science writer for the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), one of the UK’s research councils. It’s not often that those two worlds collide, although during the early summer the campus I work on is dotted with the blooms of hardy orchids.

Header image: Brooke Lark/Unsplash

The news that Iceberg lettuces are being rationed in the UK, due to supply shortages, has made me ponder the nature of salad. When I was growing up, salad was Iceberg lettuce, sliced tomatoes and cucumber. I didn’t eat salad.

Guy Singh-Watson of Riverford Organics is warning about the risks of Brexit-related disruptions to our food supply, timed to coincide with the ‘Hungry Gap‘. He says “to be told by people who have no idea how their food is produced that this is ‘project fear’ makes me incandescent with rage”. Farmers and seasoned gardeners will be nodding their heads, but everyone else may be a little perplexed. What’s the Hungry Gap?