the new pod by pod

Welcome to the new iteration of Pod by Pod!

For the last few years, this newsletter has followed a predictable format: an essay, shared once in a blue moon, that explored my experience growing food and flowers in a small tenement garden as a renter, a city-dweller, and a chronically ill/unknowingly autistic person. In the last year and a half, much has changed: we’ve moved from that first garden to owning a proper house with a yard covered in plastic shitlawn. I have torn out miles of fake grass, made a new garden, and explored garden time and neurodivergence/disability/owner privilege. My memoir-ish book-in-progress exploring the archaeological and environmental history of my former neighbourhood of Langside was, astonishingly, shortlisted for the 2023 Nan Shephard Prize. And though the things I have to say about the garden have only multiplied, the time I have to craft an essay out of those fascinations has shrunk.

This year, I’m trying something different: Regularity! A schedule! A shorter and more structured format!

There will be two newsletters each month; both will begin with a short reflection on the state of my own garden, and the themes and concerns of land rights and decolonisation that drove the newsletter before.

Then, the first newsletter of the month will include the monthly list of garden tasks from John Reid’s The Gard’ners Kalendar, an addendum to his 1683 book The Scots Gard’ner. Not only is this one of the first Scottish books on gardening, it’s also considered to be the first book of Scottish cookery, due to its endearing preoccupation with the produce of the vegetable garden, “the best of all gardens”. His monthly guidance on garden maintenance and in-season produce offers a fascinating window into late 17^th century gardening practices and gastronomical tastes. Reading in the context of our 21^st century methods and emergencies, I will reflect on our changed understanding of garden ecologies, the moving similarities (and profound differences) of what we grow now, and what he has reminded me to do in my own garden.

The second newsletter of the month will include a reflection on different aspects of historical gardening/agriculture in the UK and Ireland. My long-term research on the social history of kale in Scotland, along with the environmental history of my part of the southside of Glasgow, and, quite frankly, many rabbit holes into the history and prehistory of soil as a cultural artefact means I have accumulated lots of weird and wonderful titbits. In this section, I’ll share about old tools, methods, folklore, and archaeology that illustrate changing relationships with land from the medieval period right through to 19^th century industrialism; all of which have moved me, intrigued me, and altered my attention to and relationship with environment now.

In experimenting with this new format, my hope is to share widely the optimism and comfort I have found in searching out these old ways of gardening, farming, and eating. When mainstream discourse on the climate crisis makes any other way of life than this extractive capitalist sleepwalk feel new, feel like a risk, I find such hope in the proof of the world we had before, the proof of our mutual embeddedness within it. More often than any of us might think, there is a historical precedent for all our “new” ways of engaging sustainably and joyfully with our ecologies.

The first newsletter will go out next Wednesday, January 10.

Thank you so much to everyone who has subscribed and stuck around for all my ramblings in the past; I hope you’ll find this next incarnation just as interesting and worthwhile!