What is your new book about? It’s about bogs. Having been in the horticultural industry for a very long time, I was, and still am, a little frustrated by the fact that we are still being slow to adopt peat-free gardening. I felt like I’d said this in many different ways, in many different places. But I’d never really stopped to look at what a bog is, so I went on a journey to find out.
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Bogs have a greater role beyond being dug up – in our climate, our history and who we are as a people. So the book is my love letter to bogs, but also a plea to my industry to say please, really care about these places. The book is not about how you garden without peat – it’s why you should care about gardening without peat. Perhaps if we understood why bogs are so marvellous, we would see how foolish it is to
dig them up to grow petunias.
What did you learn from writing it? It really galvanised a sense of how important animism is for understanding the natural world. These places are truly alive, and they need to be respected and have sovereignty and autonomy to do all the things we need them to do – they are the reasons why we get to live on this planet. It made me see how essential it is to put ecology at the beginning of all our thoughts – understanding the interconnectedness of all things shows us how to make sense of them, and how to be in this world with them.
‘We have to move beyond saying, “Well, I’m peat free”’
Can you share one idea from the book? We have to move beyond saying, “Well, I’m peat free”. We need to work together so that everybody can be peat free. We need to be more political about it, going to the places that we care about, whether they’re gardens or garden centres or nurseries and saying that it’s really not OK that peat is being used. We need to collectively understand how complicated it will be for certain parts of the industry financially, economically, and timewise, and then ask what we all need to do.
We extract peat in the UK, but that’s coming to an end. But because we are a global industry, we will take extracted peat from somewhere else. It is not cool to take that kind of colonising approach and take our peat from, say, Estonia instead.
How is your new garden doing? It’s really finding its rhythm. It looks as wild as all my gardening does – it looks bonkers to everybody else, but it’s deeply pleasing to me. There are lots of edibles, but more than ever it has more of what people think of as weeds. The bogs really changed my thinking around ecology of space, and I recognise more than ever that weeds can tell you about your soil – they’re there to learn from.
Peatlands: a journey between land and water
by Alys Fowler
Hodder Press, £20
ISBN 978-1399727563
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Can you share a gardening failure? I can’t grow carrots. I think you get bad at growing something, then slightly give up. In a polyculture you don’t get carrot fly, but our current genetic crop of carrots needs equidistant spacing and no light competition or rambunctious neighbours. You can grow baby carrots well in a polyculture, but not fat carrots.
What will you read anything about or by? I love queer novels. I read lots of scientific papers on horticulture, but not many horticultural books. I have a nerdy fascination with subjects that I don’t know anything about, doing a non-fiction deep dive into deep space or medicine. And strangely, I like sports writing – about people who went up a mountain or cycled across the world.
What else are you up to? I’m starting a very small nursery in west Wales, growing perennial vegetables very, very hard on low-nitrogen requirements to see if I can make vegetables that don’t demand so much. I’m starting a PhD in October, on the public understanding of peatland conservation – I am truly hooked. I’m doing it at Keele University, which has a very cool humanities department that is interested in human and more-than-human relationships and how they coexist. Robert Macfarlane has recently published Is a River Alive? and I’m interested in how we talk about ecosystems, which give them agency in our system in terms of law and rights in the era of late-stage capitalism.
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