Watering and Composting
A chat with Linsey Rendell about allotment gardening and cultivating ideas
Linsey and I met on zoom almost exactly a year ago when I first joined the editorial team at SPACE10. I was in Australia then, and by the time I got back to London, it was her turn to fly down south to spend time with her own family and friends in Brisbane and Melbourne, meaning that we didn’t meet in person until Spring. We found each other at Peckham Levels on a gloomy day for a Bibimbap and a visit to the Feminist Library, and since then we’ve become proper friends, not just work friends.
Linsey is a writer and editor and has the most magnified attention to detail of anyone I have ever met — a fact reflected in both her work and her home, where I stayed for a couple of days in the summer to look after her sprouting allotment. Spending time in her space was such an eye-opener that it inspired me to rearrange my entire kitchen to be more like hers. A tidy-up job that I am still benefiting from today and which I wrote a whole other newsletter about.
She is thoughtful and considered but also passionate and, at times, quite feisty, and when we spend time together we mostly talk about writing and books and gardening and ideas. So that’s what we do in this conversation as well. She tells me about the long process of settling into her allotment, learning to stop and look around to determine what to do next, the books that have inspired her over the years, and the ideas and activities she’s bringing in and letting go of this season.
So, Linsey! Please, introduce yourself. Who are you? How do we know each other?
I’m actually really nervous. Just because I’m always the asker of questions and not the receiver, so I feel like this could be a really good exercise.
I’m
, I’m a writer and editor, I am originally from Australia and I currently live in London. And we know each other because we share a lot of those things in common. Being writers, being from Australia, and also, meeting through SPACE10 when you came to join our editorial team.Yeah! I’m so happy we got to connect because I feel like we share being Australian and being writers, but I also feel like we are very different, and those differences work quite well together in friendship.
Absolutely. There is something about having just a few small overlaps that create enough understanding, even if you’re not from the same country or you have completely different backgrounds.
And you live very far away from me, on the other side of London, but I’ve come to look after your flat and your garden before and so I thought for this conversation, maybe we could talk about your amazing allotment and all the work you’ve been doing there.
Yeah, it’s been really good. I’ve had this allotment since May this year, so it’s only just clocked over 6 months. Officially, I didn’t start doing any work there until June because it was quite a slow start with the changeover between myself and the previous tenant, so it was a very rushed and late start to summer, which is the main season when you can grow food here.
Allotments are a new concept for me, I didn’t know what they were until I moved to this part of London in the East. The suburb where I am is called Leyton and it’s beyond the Hackney Marshes. It’s an area that’s really, really large and really, really spread out. It’s where a lot of industry was back in the day and all the workers lived here, so there are all these workers cottages in rows and rows and rows.
Because it’s a little bit further out, there’s a lot of green spaces and a lot of allotments that are tucked in everywhere. When I first moved to this area, we went for this huge walk and ended up in Epping Forest, so we had walked through Leyton Flats and to Epping Forest and then back around and I came across this community farm, smack bang in the middle of London, and because I had previously worked on a farm, that really interested me.
I had a woman come up to me as I was looking through the gate and she said that she had been on the waitlist for two years to get a spot. When we first moved here, I didn’t know if we would be here a year or six months or a few years or how long, so putting my name on a waitlist for two years sounded totally unreasonable and not something I could do, but a year in, we re-signed the lease on this flat and we are now two years in and we have just signed again.
So a year in, I put my name on the waitlist because I thought I might as well start the process. This time last year I had the festive season, worked for two weeks in January, and then headed back home to Australia for two months. Just as I was wrapping up that trip I got an email that said, “Would you like to come and see an allotment? There is a spot at the allotment that’s free.” So I was only four or six months into the waitlist, which was just wild.
I went to see it on an incredibly rainy day. The rain was pouring down while we were standing in the garden, seeing this allotment that was in a lot worse state than I expected. I think I pictured a very structured rectangular plot, like a clear patch of field, probably no infrastructure on it, nothing in the ground, just grasses growing up and taking over. And it was not that. It was against a very old fence with a new brick wall that had been built behind that, there was barbed wire and razor wire. When you sign a lease, you sign up for taking on whatever is there and that’s your responsibility to deal with, so my heart did a little drop and the allotment supervisor who is the connection between the council and the people who have plots there said, “Well, if you want one you want one, right? It doesn’t matter.” And I was like “Ah, I guess so!”
I guess I’m someone who’s willing to put in a lot of hard work, so I took it on and started clearing, and it’s been an enormous journey. I’m still really only halfway through the site. There’s still so much work to do, but now it’s too cold and wet and muddy to dig or do much at the moment, so I have to wait until it starts to warm up, but summer was really busy. I would work eight-hour days or so, try to finish on time, then go down to the allotment for maybe four hours until the sun was setting, or until the sun had set. My neighbours at the allotment would come over and say, “You need to go home, it’s dark!”.
There was always just so much to do and my brain would be waking up in the morning, making a list of things to do at the allotment, sometimes I’d go down before work and sometimes I’d wait till the end of the day and go down and do four hours and then I’d go on the weekends as well. So I was often doing like 30 hours at the lot, as well as work, so I was a bit exhausted by the end of summer.
It was also very much a learning curve because I’m not used to this climate. I used to work on a farm in Victoria in Australia, so it was a temperate climate but it doesn’t get as cold as here and it’s not as dry here in the Summer. Then there are just all these pests and diseases I’m not used to that are very prevalent because — I guess it’s almost like a metaphor for a city in general - everyone is packed into this small space and all doing things their way and that doesn’t always work together, it clashes a lot. Socially and in working with the land.
So, there’s always something you’re dealing with — pests, whether it’s a tiny flea beetle that really wants to eat your broccoli seedlings, or slugs in multiple stages of summer or autumn, and it makes you understand why it’s so hard to grow food in the UK. In Australia, I would just pop a seed in the ground and it would grow.
Here, a lot of people don’t even put things in the ground because they are worried about what’s in the soil, like what level of toxicity is in the soil. I don’t know if it’s true, but from the amount of rubbish that I dig out of the earth, we think it used to be a dump in the Victorian era. We’re all pulling out broken plates and broken crockery and pieces of ceramics, as well as spoons or metal or glass bottles, glass shards that have smoothed out over time, the same way they do in the sea. It’s archaeology in many ways.
You talk about what hard work it was and all the hours that you spent there, and I could really see that when I went and looked after it for a couple of days. What you had described to me as a mess with so much rubbish was this beautiful, Japanese garden of a garden bed. The rows were so beautifully organized, you could see the cosmos leaves coming out and the tomato vines were all in a straight line and it was so gorgeous. I think that’s a testament to the way you work in general, but I wonder if you might be able to talk about how you ordered things in your mind, and how you decided what you were going to plant.
It’s interesting, it’s almost like what I assume it’s like having a child. You’re like, “I’m going to do everything absolutely perfectly”, and then, of course, that idea doesn’t stick for very long because the reality is messier than that. So I think with the garden, I had these ideas about how it would be done, but at the same time, you can only do as much as you can do, and that’s one of the lessons that I’ve been learning, and being okay with having to walk away at the end of the day and not everything is done. Being okay with planting way behind schedule. Right now, it’s the middle of December, and I have not put all of my spring bulbs into pots and I’m so late. I haven’t put my garlic in the ground, but I’m going to do it anyway. I’m going to do it when it gets done and hopefully, some of it will grow. If it doesn’t, I’ll keep a record of that and hopefully next year I’ll be on time.
But in terms of choosing what to grow, I think that just comes from when I worked on a farm. We grew a lot of things — fruit, veg, and flowers — and so it’s informed by knowing what crops go with what seasons and when they are planted, but also in a way I’ve planted things that I can’t always afford here.
One of the things I really wanted to grow was leeks and fun onions, not just the regular brown or red, really fun ones, but there is a grub that likes to eat exactly those plants. It eats garlic and onions, it’s an allium leaf miner, and it will destroy everything, so that’s something myself and my neighbours learnt this year. I had this beautiful crop of leeks that I never got to eat.
But a lot of people do grow onions and potatoes and these are the cheapest things at the supermarket here. You can eat quite a lot of potatoes and onions, carrots, and root vegetables like sweet potatoes here in London. A lot for a little money. And for me, because I can access those things here, I want to grow other things. I can’t afford to buy kilos and kilos and kilos of tomatoes from a farmer’s market, and lettuces just taste so much better when they come out of the ground. So I think it’s about taste and what’s in season, and maybe what I know how to grow already.
So, that’s how I choose, but how I order things, again I think it comes back to that knowledge from when I was working on the farm, I haven’t really had to think about understanding when or why I do something because some of that is built in, but it’s also about looking around and seeing what needs to be done. This is one of the lessons that came from the elder of the patch, the knowledge keeper who’s been there for like 45 years. He’d arrive and I’d ask what he was working on that day and he would say, “I’m not sure yet. What are you working on?”, and I’d say, “Well, I need to do this, this, and this.” His approach was that maybe he had an idea, maybe he needed to trim back the foliage on his tomatoes, but then he would look around and see what needed to be done. So you’re also just responding to how everything looks and what attention it might need. That’s another lesson that I’ve come to this year.
The orderliness has absolutely dissolved. Maybe not entirely, but this is what’s interesting as humans — I came to this patch and there were grasses and weeds and blackberries in these huge mounds growing out of the earth that I had to clear and dig the roots out, and then what do you do with it? You create lines. You create borders and orderly things when the soil and the level of the soil are not even. The shape of my patch isn’t a rectangle either because it’s wonky and whoever put a path in originally put it in wonky. So, my patch is this unusual shape where it’s not square to the fence, it’s on an angle, it’s smaller on one end than it is on the other and so even if I create these straight lines, it’s never as tidy as it could be.
I also think it’s really interesting that humans take a parcel of landscape and then put squares into it. In my mind, I would absolutely love for it to be squigglier and have these curved spaces or not have straight pathways, just have stepping stones maybe, but my brain doesn’t do that yet, so my brain has done what it knows. The farm I worked on was maybe 50 metres deep and just rows and rows and rows, right? Still small scale, only about an acre of land, but I knew how to grow in straight lines, but here because I need netting to keep the foxes and the birds and the squirrels off the small crops while they are still developing, having a squiggly garden doesn’t really work, so I’m still thinking it through.
There are two things you’ve said that have caught my attention. The first thing is, isn’t it interesting that humans feel this need to put a straight line in a natural world where straight lines don’t exist, for one? And for two, what your allotment elder said about reacting to what they see and acting accordingly. I feel like that must help build such a stronger rapport with the environment around you, rather than just writing out a list of, must do this, must do that. Getting to the plot, looking around you, smelling things, touching things, and from that deciding, okay I need to do this. I feel like it would foster such a healthy relationship with your surroundings.
Yeah, absolutely. Some of the interviews that I’ve been doing for my writing lately have been about humans having a better relationship with place or a better relationship with the more-than-human. The more-than-human might be a river or a small plot of land, and a lot of the people I’ve been speaking with have been talking about the sensory aspect of making the human as quiet as possible. Listening and noticing and maybe mapping or making illustrations of what you see and just getting a sense of who is in that place and how all the moving parts are working together or not working together.
Farming is not this because farming is still production and it’s food for humans, even though we might let the squirrels take a piece of corn and if the foxes trample something, that’s okay, most of it is for our benefit.
When you come to the garden, one of the things I’ve been doing is just noticing where the sun falls, and in the case of my garden, it does not get any direct sunlight in winter so far. The low level of the sun in winter means that it wraps around the buildings and never quite gets to the point where in the afternoon in summer it’s just blaring down before it gets to this big tree and then sets behind the tree. So, watching where the sun goes, watching how the wind moves through the space, watching how water falls — like how the rain falls on the uneven ground, and if it is slanting, do I fix the slant or is it okay that it slants because some plants like water more than others?
It’s a lot of noticing and at the moment one of the most delightful things is that I have a small red-breasted robin that comes to visit. There are a lot of birds at the patch, and most of the birds that were there in summer are there now, but the robin wasn’t around before, it’s only been there since things have gotten a bit more sparse and it’s obviously looking for food. If I’m weeding, the vibrations of me weeding tells the worms in the ground that something is happening and maybe they want to move, so they come up out of the earth, and I’ll then move away from that spot and the robin will fly down, get a snack and then fly back up. It knows that humans somehow produce worms coming out of the ground, so we kind of work together. Obviously, I want the worms in the ground, but I also want the robin there, so it’s been hanging out with me and it sings really quietly. I’ll hear it and be like, “Oh, you’re here”, and I can go say hi.
So sweet! And it’s not like that one robin is going to eat every single worm. I’m sure the worms will be ok — one worm can be sacrificed!
I was kind of hoping it would eat the slugs, but it doesn’t seem as interested.
No, those juicy juicy worms are much too tempting.
I think the other birds do eat the slugs though. There are parakeets and magpies, there’s even a woodpecker, which is great. And in spring when it starts to slightly warm up, the starlings come, they’ll be around my flat as well which is about a 10-minute walk to the allotment.
So nice. You were talking a bit before about your work, and who you were interviewing and those sorts of things. I have noticed, from reading your recent work, that you use gardening as a kind of metaphor. I would love to talk to you about that, about the cultivation of ideas, watering them and composting them.
I think it’s come up more lately because I’ve had this opportunity to participate in a residency with Dutch Design Week. Essentially, they gave me a platform to explore ideas or ways of storytelling that I wanted to explore. I had two prompts that I had to weave into that narrative and those were, “How do we make the planet thrive?”, and “How does design contribute to ecological flourishing?”. I was also looking at product design, which I felt uncomfortable about, so I wove in some of my other work about production and consumption and economies, and I ended up discussing product through that lens.
The gardening references, I guess because I was gardening so much at that time, were on my mind and it is a nice metaphor. It’s not a perfect thing, but it’s an easy way for people to have a greater connection to the natural world and with food and plants and improve diets. I think food is a great entry point for many things and if you go to the growing aspect, it has a lot of great benefits.
Compost also comes up a lot in the design landscape because we’re talking about rot and decay and then we’re talking about regeneration or things that are breaking down but are still alive and that are actually really nourishing, so thinking about those cycles as metaphors in a general way of living sense, but also in a design sense.
I can’t remember the source, but I’m certain that the act of watering something, I read from someone else, so I would have to go back and find that. It could have been Robin Wall Kimmerer, who I reference a lot in the work that I’ve been writing because Braiding Sweetgrass was such a pivotal moment. There have been quite a few books in the past couple of years, or the past 10 years, that I could name as really pivotal moments in how they changed my way of thinking about people and place. Her book Braiding Sweetgrass is one of those books. But when I came up with this idea of integrating composting into the actual writing, I also wanted to think about how that gardening metaphor could be part of the process.
Originally, I wanted to create this “listening garden” to disrupt the linear nature of reading an article, so people could dip in and dip out, but the brief changed slightly, so it didn’t end up being that. But I had these metaphors of compost and watering — what would we compost and what would we water? — and then I was like, how could the methodology of me making this thing, whether it’s an article or something else, also be like gardening? I think the main thing that I took from that was paying attention and listening. So I ended up doing some field recordings that go with the article as an act of me sitting in this new place and trying to notice who was there. Who was there who’s not human?
You just mentioned that there have been a few books that have really impacted your ideas and I’d love to know what books they are.
I think the starting point for me was Uncle Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu, which is probably coming up to its 10th anniversary. That has been really impactful in Australia because it’s mostly about undoing the erasure of colonisation in the country, but it’s also about landscape and seeds and grasses and it’s about making bread from traditional seeds and what was there before colonisation. There are a lot of linkages with pre-colonisation agriculture and also what has come since then. And it’s about noticing.
Then to go even further back than that, Masanobu Fukuoka’s The One-Straw Revolution was, I think, the very first book I read about farming before I worked on the farm. He was a Japanese farmer around the '60s or '70s in Japan. Japan had been infiltrated by the American farming regime of big agriculture and they’d introduced a lot of wheat and white bread and things into the Japanese diet and it was not good for the landscape. So, Masanobu Fukuoka came up with this way of farming where you could grow rice, and maybe grow it with less water as well because that’s one of the things about rice is that you need to flood the planes, but then I think buckwheat is the companion plant that puts nutrients back into the soil. So there is this cycle of summer-winter or spring-autumn, and it creates a companionship between these two seasons of plants.
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer as well, and then adrienne maree brown has also been really monumental to the way that I think, or the way that I hope that I might think one day. It’s obviously an ongoing journey, but she has so much wisdom to share, particularly in organising a movement. I’m a fangirl over here.
Then more recently, there are a lot of ladies who I would hold up as the latest Girl Crush — Jenny Odell who has written about time and many other things. She also brings in a lot of references that adrienne maree brown is also referencing, so there are a lot of nice synergies between the different points. Adrienne maree brown also brings in Octavia Butler in terms of feminist sci-fi, and then from there you’ve got Ursula Le Guin, and if you meet someone and you can gush over Octavia Butler together, you know you’re in a good space.
It’s so funny that you mention Ursula Le Guin because one of my other interviewees (Maria, coming in the new year!) provides a quote from her as well. She’s obviously got a lot of admirers. All of those are such amazing touchstones of environment and sharing ideas, but I wonder in your own life, what are you watering and what are you composting?
It’s been a really big year and, frankly quite, an exhausting year and I had hoped for a big rest towards the end of this year, but I’ve also been working on these really interesting projects, so there’s been a little bit of rest with slower mornings and then still doing a lot of work. So, I think what I’m watering at the moment is that slower pace and letting myself move with the seasons and letting winter be slower.
As a writer, I think I should be reading a lot. My writing is only good if I’m reading other people’s work as well and this year I wasn’t reading as much. I usually have quite an aspirational outlook on how much I should be either listening to as an audiobook or reading as a physical book, and I had to let that go a little bit to garden this year. So, now in winter while the garden is quieter and maybe I’m only going once or twice a week, I’ll try to pick up that reading again. I’ve told myself that maybe because I’m working three days a week now, Thursdays become a reading day. There’s a lot of non-fiction I want to read but because of the state of the world, the non-fiction that I read is not always the lightest of material, so I don’t want to be reading that right before bed. So there are novels before bed and then there needs to be non-fiction time so that it’s not getting neglected.
I feel very content with a Saturday in bed, reading books or doing not much, and that also creates space for ideas to come in. I’ll tell myself I’m not going to be at my computer and then I’ll be reading and I’ll have an idea from that reading or there will be a quote that I want to take down and that will take me on a spiral and then I’ve written a journal post, which is also something that I don’t prioritise, so it’s good for creating creative space for that as well. So yeah, more rest and more reading is what I am watering this season.
What am I composting? I mean, I’m composting literal compost. But I think there are ideas around compost that I really want to explore. I was part of this feminist sci-fi reading group last year and we got to a point where there was lots of rot and decay and so I asked my mum for books for Christmas and I think she might have sent me a whole bunch and some of those are around the subject of rot and decay. Not literally, but as part of a narrative and from a feminist perspective, so I think that’s a subject matter I want to look at more and I’ve acquired some fiction to start diving into that.
I think it probably ties into this Feminisms course I have just finished with the Institute of Post-Natural Studies. Some of the feminisms, like cyber-feminism, are familiar but not something I have sat with. For example, I reference Donna Haraway’s work a lot but I haven’t read all of her books. There were a lot of other types of feminism that came up that I’m not familiar with but am open to learning more about too. So that and these ideas of rot and decay from these female fiction perspectives will probably end up intersecting, but I’m not sure yet.
Thanks so much for joining me for this lovely chat with the lovely Linsey. She always imparts so much worldy wisdom on me, so I hope that this conversation connected with you as much as it did with me. If that’s the case, I’d love it if you could share it with a friend!
Lots of love and see you in the next one,
Annabel x