Photographer and writer Lalage Snow spoke at our 2024 Literary Festival about her books My Family and Other Seedlings and War Gardens, in conversation with Larissa Brown. We are pleased to share this exclusive extract from My Family and Other Seedlings, A year on a Dorset allotment (Quercus 2024):
November.
I had thought about making compost when I initially took over the plot but the very first mention of the word induced a lot of pursed lips and paused ‘Ooooh’s from those to whom I spoke; chiefly, my mother-in-law, my mother and my brother. ‘It’s a lot harder than you’d think,’ said one. ‘Rats,’ warned another. ‘Faff,’ said another. ‘Unless you know what you’re doing.’
As I emphatically did not I quickly forgot all about it.
But how hard could it really be? When I saw the other compost bins in action it looked like a mixture of vegetable food waste and some grasses and leaves. What would be the worst that could happen? A few rats gnawing through an old teabag? Hardly the bubonic plague.
I used to skim-read the advice about soil conditioning in books or newspapers. All I knew was that adding manure to your soil was important. I didn’t know why or care that much either. ‘Yes, yes, boooooring. Let’s get to the good bit about colour and frilly flowers.’ This year, however, I had seen the results of good soil. Or rather, I had been reminded of it. I’d fed our corn to J’s family on his birthday. My mother-in-law’s had failed. ‘You’ve got good soil there,’ she had said.
I’d given a lettuce to my own mother. ‘You grew this?’ she asked in disbelief. When I beamed proudly she said, ‘You’ve got good soil.’ I had shown images of my whole plot to my brother who texted back. ‘Good earth you’ve got there. Look after it.’ Three little words.
Look.
After.
It.
Soil. Earth. Mud. In its basic form it is clod and sod and so far from being an accepted natural household addition like a flower or fruit or even pretty feathers that it annoys us when it is smeared on clothes, cemented under fingernails or trodden into a carpet. Even more so when it clogs and breaks a Hoover filter. It’s the stuff that in recent years we have encouraged children to play with (but not too much) and are too eager to wash off their hands. There is a whole movement of people dedicated to exercising to the extreme in mud and fetishising the muckiness only to wash it all off as soon as possible because, if seen on a person, mud and dirt is a sign of being unkempt. Quite the opposite on a vehicle – notably the big SUV-style 4x4s. So much so that in the mid-2000s in the United Kingdom people would be prepared to spend £20 for mud in a spray can for their 4x4s to give the impression they’d actually been off-roading and were therefore more adventurous or posher than they actually were. And it might be grubby and muddy and dirty but it is the protector of objects buried, the stuff archaeologists look at in great detail for clever things like carbon dating. Aside from that soil is dirt and grub and filth and squalor and woe betide anyone finding mud on supermarket produce.
Dig deep with soil and you go back in time. In its deconstructed form it is an ancient thing. Years of erosion and a combination of clay, mineral particles, Mycobacterium vaccae, geosmin, leaves, eroded insect dust, petrichor; it is a living, breathing being that can mimic the effects of Prozac on our neurons.
The Romans understood the importance of good earth and the effect of mud and composts on plant growth. They used marl to enrich the soil, differentiated between different types of manure and made numerous composts and green manures. This knowledge and expertise was taken to every corner of the Roman empire. Back then different animal manure was readily available given the custom of fattening birds and animals in aviaries, dovecots, stalls and stables. The Greeks, Romans and Arabs could and did choose from the dung of birds, cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, horses, donkeys, mules and even humans. Pliny recommended human poo and urine as the best fertiliser – particularly when collected after a banquet. How he came to this particular and unsavory conclusion denotes a dedication to the study of poo and its effects which went above and beyond the ‘mildly curious’. But that’s Pliny for you. I have an absurd image of him hiding furtively behind the latrines nursing the effects of the night before (perhaps nibbling on a cabbage leaf), hem of his toga lifted in one hand, resolutely waiting until no one was looking to take samples for trial in a miniature amphora held in the other.
I digress. Botanical experiments flourished in the mid-fifteenth century but it wasn’t until the nineteenth century that the essential constituents of plant food were identified. German chemist Justus von Liebig discovered the full cycle of nutrition first in plants and then in animals. His experiments went on to stimulate the foundation of the artificial fertiliser industries of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This was vital at a time when fewer farms and homes had a ready supply of horse poo thanks to the introduction of mechanised farming methods like tractors. Muck heaps were fast diminishing and increasingly replaced by chemicals. In the twenty-first century there has been a pushback against artificial and chemical additions to the garden but the advancement of the agro-chemical industry has left its mark. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that even today shelves in garden centres can resemble a chemist’s.
But I knew none of this as I set up a collapsible bin my father had found in his treasure trove of junk and started loading it up with grasses, eggshells, orange peel, the spent maize spears and roots, rotting courgette stems and couch grass tufts.
This compost bin was my own ‘mud kitchen’. I would be putting back what I took out, trying to lessen the frightening statistics about the impending barren topsoil and reaping the benefits in so doing. At least, that was the aim.
Mud. Earth. Dirt. I thought. Call it what you will. It is the sum of all its parts. It is land which we strive to own and tame but never will for it is the first layer of earth, and the last we will ever know.
—
Award winning freelance photojournalist, writer and filmmaker Lalage Snow has covered war and unrest in the Middle East and Afghanistan since 2007, making Kabul her home for over five years. There, she worked for a variety of publications including The Sunday Times, The FT, The Telegraph and Granta, to name but a few. She has also worked in Gaza, The West Bank, Israel, Eastern Ukraine, Bangladesh, Jordan and Iraq.
She has written her first book, War Gardens, which will be published by Quercus in 2018 and explores current conflicts through the peaceful act of gardening.