7.8.24 – fallow, yet inoculate

The Gard’ner’s Kalendar – August

The first newsletter of every month this year will include an excerpt from gardener John Reid’s 1683 book The Gard’ner’s Kalendar, an addendum to his book The Scots Gard’ner.

            Fallow bordures, beds, nurseries, and the bulks of trees. Yet inoculate. Ply and purge trees. Pull up suckers and weeds. Clip hedges. Gather the stones of black cherrie and morella. Gather mezerion berries. Gather the seeds of most herbes and flowers. Cut your physick herbes. In the beginning sow cabbage (tho’ I confess it’s too late. See last moneth.). Beets and beet-card, spinage, black-radish, chervil, lettuce, corn-sallade, endive, scorzonera, carvy, marygold, angelica, scurvy-grass, &c. Take up ripe onions, garleeks, and shallot. Unbind buds inoculated. Cut and string strawberries. Lay July-flowers. Sow columbines, holyhoks, larks-heels, candy tuffs, popies, and such as can endure winter.

            Take up your bulbs and plant as in the last. Sift the ground for tulips and gladiolus. Plunge in potted annualls in vacants. Keep down weeds by hawing. Lay grass, beat, roll, and mow well. Make goosberrie and curran wine.

            Towards the end take bees, take the lightest first; those that are near heaths may differ a little. Destroy wasps, straiten the passage by putting on the hecks to secure from robers.

Garden Dishes and Drinks in Season

Many pot-herbes and sallades, cabbage, cole-flower, beet-card, turneep, radish, carrot, beet-raave, scorzonera, peas, beans, and kidnees, artichocks, cucumbers, aples, pears, plumes, apricocks, geens, goosberries, currans, rasps, strawberries, &c.

            Cyder, metheglin, cherrie wine, curran wine, goosberrie wine, raspberrie wine, &c.

Fallow, yet inoculate. Rest, yet prepare. In the spirit of such direction, this newsletter will take a short break for an August holiday and resume again for September.

In the meantime, as we show up on the streets and within our communities to resist fascist violence that is targeting the most vulnerable people in British society (refugees, racialised communities, trans and queer people), here are just a few Substacks that I think powerfully illuminate the ways in which nature writing and gardening are inherently held with the matrix of colonial violence and white supremacy, and how they affect/are affected by current white-wing terrorism:

Becoming Ivy, by Alycia Pirmohamed

Reclaiming Heritage, by Carmen Sheridan

Systems of Violence, by Gareth Richards

Unlearning our bias, by Jasmine Qureshi

Land Matters, by Sui Searle

Culture Wars, by Sui Searle

If you have funds to spare, Refuweegee is an organisation in Glasgow that does vital work in caring for refugees across Scotland, from creating welcome packs, to sourcing prams and mobile phones, to offering toiletries and food items that can be prepared in hotel rooms, to creating a safe space in the city centre where everyone is welcome. Your contributions directly support this incredible work, which is all the more difficult and costly during times of racist, Islamaphobic violence.

Additionally, the genocide in Palestine committed by Israel and Western superpowers is ongoing. There are hundreds of fundraising efforts to gain families safe passage out of Gaza and to sustain themselves while still under siege, with the IDF using starvation and polio to further torture innocent people. If you have cash to spare, please, choose any that cross your social feeds. Here’s one to start you off, for the friend of a friend who is a student in New York City and whose family is from northern Gaza but have been displaced to the south.

and lastly

I’m delighted and honoured that my essay The Kailyards – about the life and death of my beloved tenement garden and its ancestral kin of Scottish kailyards – has been longlisted for the 2024 Nature Chronicles Prize. Many thanks to the judges for reading my work with such generosity, and congratulations to all the other longlisters!