Advance proof copies of Q is for Garden have arrived 📦
Set to be a book of the summer, @jenny.chamarette ’s book is a bold and tender exploration of how queerness and nature entwine - and what happens when we step beyond the binaries that fence us in.
There’s is a Q in garden, but you can’t always see it 🌱
Booksellers and reviewers - get in touch to request a copy! ✉️
#queerbooks #naturebooks #earthday #gardening #history
We are delighted to announce we will be publishing @jenny.chamarette 's bold exploration of how queerness and nature entwine in 2026.
'Q is for garden: Tending the histories of queer cultivation' blends memoir, history and cultural criticism to imagine what happens when we step beyond the binaries that fence us in.
From illness and recovery to queer love and ecological wonder, the book invites readers to rethink how we inhabit land, culture and each other. Drawing on the histories of queer gardeners, botanists, artists and agriculturalists, Chamarette offers a hopeful vision of belonging, if we are curious enough to unearth it.
'Q is for garden' will be published in the UK in July 2026.
With just a couple months till my book Q is for Garden is out with @manchester_university_press I’ve been thinking a lot about how land tending and community go hand in hand.
The small bonds between people and place feel so important in times of rising fascism and ultranationalism. Land knows that all who tend it are welcome. I feel lucky to live in a small part of the world where the politics of land preservation and community are more widely shared.
I can’t find the original source of the Borges poem I cite:
So plant your own gardens and decorate your own soul, instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers
I love being brought flowers. But I also make them every day. Thank you to Lennard Road Allotments for this visit to their green palace.
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#allotmentsofinstagram #allotmentlove #takenote #naturejournalling #qisforgarden
Happy National Gardening Week, which is taking place until the 3 May 🌻
We're sharing details of garden essays included in The Nature Chronicles Prize Anthologies 🌱
In Volume 1 there is Q is for Garden, by Jenny Chamarette and The Fence by Laura Coleman.
In Volume 2, you can find The Kailyards by Meg Bertera-Berwick
Happy reading and gardening!
#NationalGardeningWeek #Gardening #Gardeners #Pollinators
Happy publication day to the beautiful new paperback edition of THIS ALLOTMENT!
Being part of this anthology has been an ongoing gift. I’ve felt honoured to journey alongside the writers in this collection. Including the late and brilliant @saraandnoahvenn who reminds us all to seek forgiveness rather than permission. And of course the wonderful @sarah_e_rigby at @elliottandthompson , who brought us all together.
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#ThisAllotment #naturewriting #AllFlourishingIsMutual #gardenwriting #allotmenting
The allotment is mine only to hold, never to own. And it frames me too. It shapes me in ways I am learning to express.
I carried this sentiment into my essay in the gorgeous, glorious anthology This Allotment, celebrating the voices of writers across the spectrum who spend time in allotments. And what a joyful thing it is too.
To celebrate the upcoming publication of This Allotment in paperback, I’ve teams up with @elliottandthompson to offer an early copy to one lucky reader!
To enter:
🌼Make sure you’re following @elliottandthompson and @jenny.chamarette
🌼Tell us one thing you’ve learned from growing on your plot, pot, balcony or windowsill in the comments below
🌼 Bonus entries: Tag a friend in the comments and/or share to your stories (making sure to tag us so we don’t miss it!)
🌼Closes 23 March
🌼UK only
🌱 This Allotment publishes in paperback 2 April.
#ThisAllotment #AllotmentLife #BookGiveaway
Images 1 and 3 courtesy of Yellow Bird Photography
Just a short cleansing daffodil portrait for your feed.
Derek Jarman planted daffodils in the shingle of Dungeness. Jamaica Kincaid first loathed the imperial logic of the Wordsworth poem she was taught to recite in Antigua - then planted thousands in her garden in Vermont.
Me, I love their loud bright heads, lined along the beds of the allotment. They return each year, shouting about resilience and pride.
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#allotmenting #myallotment #naturediary #daffodilseason marchflowers
GOOD LORD it’s been a long winter.
But spring is coming… and so is Q is for Garden.
This book has been years in the making - and at points I thought it would never see the light of day. But it DID and I’m mawkishly grateful to my amazing agent @caroniclarke and my editor at MUP, Tom Dark for getting it there.
PRE-ORDERS are now online and if you place a pre-order with Waterstones between TODAY and Friday 20 February there is a 25% DISCOUNT using the code FEB26.
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#qisforgarden #takenote #bookpreorder #WPreorder #naturewriting
I wrote a review of #thebookofbogs for @caughtbytheriver while on trains to the North West, while in hospital corridors, while dreaming of wild fells and bog spirits. Dig in over at Caught By The River - link in bio. Thank you to @annabamabanana and @clareshaw1 , @littletollerbooks and all the contributors for this glorious collection of deep peaty thinking.
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#boggart #peatlands #naturewriting #landstewardship
The Sleepers: Study Day 🛌📖
This event invites you to an afternoon of talks and conversation around rest, sleep and creative expression.
Bringing together writers and academics, this event explores how we might challenge the notion that productivity is the only marker of worth and reimagine rest as a site of resistance and creative possibility.
Through the perspectives of three powerful speakers — Natalia D Kane @nat_d_kane , Akshi Singh @akshi______________ , and Jenny Chamarette @jenny.chamarette — we will reflect on how disability, activism and creativity intersect in everyday life and cultural work.
This event forms part of our wider programme for the exhibition The Sleepers that explores how women artists have articulated complex and differing experiences of sleep and rest.
This event warmly welcomes members of the general public as well as students, researchers and academics.
🗓️ 26 January, 1–4.15pm
📍Murray Edward’s College
🎟️ £18 (£13 concessions, free for students and College members)
♿️ The room for the talks and the exhibition is wheelchair accessible. There are folding stools, benches and a large print guide in the exhibition. A British Sign Language interpreter will be provided.
#WomensArtCollection #TheSleepers #MurrayEdwardsCollege #Art #UniversityofCambridge
While my partner dug a space for the new pond on the allotment in the low frosted sun, I spent the last day of the year in GP surgeries and hospitals arranging urgent care for my mother. If you’ve been following my Substack you’ll know a little more about my recent return to caring, and the reasons for it. I’ve heard care spoken about in glowing, near-sacred terms before. But my experience of caring is dull, inglorious, fatiguing, revolting, mindbending repetition. Ethical incertitude. Betrayals of self and other. Care work is the opposite end of a love affair: a dark spectrum of anti-desire and dull, uninspiring necessary labour. And somehow fitting for 2025: a year of all this on a wider scale. So maybe I am entering 2026 not on a theme of hope but of surrender to what comes. Neither despair nor passivity. Just a soft, tender meeting point.
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#carework #takenote #careandnature #queerkinship #loveisadoingword
Ooh! Look! It’s Q is for Garden in @_thebookseller !
Thank you to @likewinterblue for the review and the pick - am excited for this book baby to come out into the world.
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#bookstagram #qisforgarden #queergardener #queergardening #queergarden #writinglife
