Rhapsody in Green: A Writer, an Obsession, a Laughably Small Excuse for a Vegetable Garden

- Blurb -

' Excellent book' - Nigella Lawson' 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.