Guest Post: Trustee Nicola Saunders shares her thoughts on two special books and awakening green fingers
Photographs by Helmsley Walled Garden/Nicola Saunders
Nicola Saunders, Director of Environmental Responsibility & Innovation at Arts Council England and one of our trustees can’t resist buying beautiful books. Nicola has spent over 20 years working in the publishing industry, initially on Peter Rabbit and other children’s characters at Penguin, followed by publishing art books at the National Portrait Gallery in London. On a recent visit to Helmsley Walled Garden, she treated herself to Why Women Grow: Stories of Soil, Sisterhood and survival, and her husband to Ferment: Slow Down, Make Food to Last. Nicola shares her thoughts about these books and discovering her love of gardening.
Our Helmsley Walled Garden shop offers a lovingly curated, ever-changing range of beautiful, interesting and inspiring books to buy; from gardening how to books, to cookery books, from novels to children’s books. Take a peek next time you visit.
Ferment from scratch: Slow Down, Make Food to Last – Mark Diacono (RRP £14.00)
As part of our drive for self-sufficiency, we have always tried to make the most of our homegrown produce by making jams, chutneys and pickling whatever is leftover. Ferment from scratch is a beautifully designed book with clear, understandable instructions and a warm tone. The recipes are a great way to use up gluts. So far, we’ve made a very delicate rhubarb tepache drink (page 146) from a surplus of rhubarb and enjoyed our first attempt at kombucha (pages 59-60). But the big success has been the sauerkraut recipe (page 36-37), which has allowed us to make huge jars of sauerkraut from cabbages from our local food surplus charity. We now add sauerkraut to most meals! Next on the list is honey fermented garlic, using our very own honey and homegrown garlic.
Why Women Grow: Stories of Soil, Sisterhood and Survival – Alice Vincent (Hardback RRP £16.99, Paperback RRP £10.99)
If you are looking for a warm, comforting, inspiring, and at times emotional book about gardening, then this is for you. Alice Vincent set out to understand Why Women Grow, “what had encouraged them to go out, work the soil, plant seeds and nurture them…”. Normally, I race through reading a book but for some reason I have found myself slowly savouring this one. I dip in and out, reading it first thing in the morning with my pot of tea, last thing at night after a weary workday, and when I’m sitting in our garden with our chickens softly sleeping nearby. Each chapter evokes memories of the gardens we’ve tended to, the garden I grew up in, or the myriad of gardens we’ve visited over the years. Alice Vincent shares her own gardening journey whilst seamlessly weaving in the stories of the women who responded to her question, “What drew you to gardening?”. It really is a joy of a read. And once read, listen to Alice Vincent’s podcast Why Women Grow where she has inspiring conversations with designers, chefs, entrepreneurs and writers in their gardens.
My Gardening Journey
In some respects, my husband and I were late to gardening. We mainly rented in London and bought our first house with a garden seven years ago. That small, green space would change our lives. We both fell in love with our London garden, and from that very first spring, gardening has become our shared passion.
We began seeing the world anew. Any journey, even our commutes, held interest and joy by looking at the trees and flowers all around.
Whilst beginning to create a garden filled with colour and joy, countless gardening memories returned from my small childhood garden: the smell of the honeysuckle draped over the asbestos-laden garage that intruded into our back garden, the vivid yellow of the roundly-shaped forsythia, the fire-red leaves of the sumac tree in autumn, the patch of chives that grew near the back door, ready to be cut for egg sandwiches, weighty piles of summer runner beans and tomatoes on the blue plastic weighing scales in the kitchen. All memories of my lovely Mum’s gardening, somehow squeezed in between raising me and my sister and holding down various jobs. Vivid and happy memories, I realised.
Of course, the garden became our haven in lockdown, as for so many others. We worked hard to be as sustainable as we could and also adopted four chickens. Our life was transforming.
Then, we upped sticks and headed to Yorkshire, finding our dream home in Kirkbymoorside last year. We are lucky enough to have a large garden, split into a main garden, an orchard, and a woodland strip. It is a beautiful established garden that reveals new joys and treasures to us every week. It is a true privilege to garden here.
My husband leads on fruit and veg, trees, building sheds and beekeeping. I lead on shrubs, flowers, herbs, fence painting and keeping chickens.
The orchard is being reshaped with new geometric-shaped raised beds (thanks to my maths teacher husband). Trees have been successfully moved and our chickens, Gertrude, Beth, Margery and Ellen, named after amazing women gardeners, have a new coop and run. We have two beehives and are starting to harvest honey.
We share our orchard with a wonderful array of birds, two hedgehogs, mice, bats, toads, frogs, a mole, and a nosey pheasant who tries to steal the chickens’ food! And with the parts of our garden left wild, we hope much more wildlife will thrive.
It is a real privilege to be a Helmsley Walled Garden trustee and an inspiration to work with amazing volunteers, staff and other trustees.
A line from Alice Vincent’s book keeps coming to mind, “To garden is to cultivate a superpower”. And I couldn’t agree more.
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