Rhapsody in Green: A Writer, an Obsession, a Laughably Small Excuse for a Vegetable Garden

'Read Rhapsody in Green. A novelist's beautiful, useful essays about her tiny garden.' - India Knight * 'Glorious . . . for anyone who loves fruit, vegetables, herbs and language. It makes you see them with new eyes.' - Diana Henry * 'A witty account of 'extreme allotmenteering' for all obsessive gardeners' - Mail on Sunday * 'An extremely entertaining and inspiring story of one woman's passionate transformation of a small, irregular shaped urban garden into a bountiful source of food.' - Woman & Home * 'A gardening book like no other, this is the author's 'love letter' to her garden. She relays warm and witty stories about the trials and tribulations throughout her gardening year.' - Garden News * ' . . . this inspirational, funny book, written by someone who hankers after a homesteader's lifestyle, will make you look at even your window box in a new, more productive light.' - The Simple Things

'Gardening is not a hobby but a passion: a mess of excitement and compulsion and urgency and desire. Those who practise it are botanists, evangelists, freedom fighters, midwives and saboteurs; we kill; we bleed. No, I can't drop everything to come in for dinner; it's a matter of life and death out here.'

Novelist Charlotte Mendelson has a secret life. Despite owning only six square metres of urban soil and a few pots, she is an extreme gardener; the creator of a tiny but bountiful edible jungle. And like all enthusiasts, she will not rest until you share her obsession. This is the story of an amateur gardener's journey to addiction: her attempts to buy lion dung from London Zoo and to build her own cold frame; her disinhibited composting and creative approach to design; her prejudices (roses, purple flowers, people with orchards); and her passions: quinces, salad-leaves, herbs, Japanese greens and ancient British apples.

It is a story of where fantasy meets reality, of the slow onset of a consuming love and, most of all, of how gardening, however peculiar, can save your life.