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Rereading this yet again, this time thinking most about setting, particularly Orkney.

This (unlikeable) protagonist of this book touts cliches as life lessons including quoting Forest Gump. Just no.

What begins as a book about an idyllic cottage garden quickly deepens into a complex narrative about healing the ancestral trauma of slavery and ongoing institutional racism while surviving a pandemic. I particularly appreciated Farrell’s discoveries regarding the ‘invasive’ plants and common English garden plants that were actually colonial imports. Farrell’s lyrical exploration of being othered by the idea of ‘Englishness’ is something I understood, also being an immigrant, though I am white and this has saved me from the worst aspects of British xenophobia. This is also a book for anyone who is breaking ground—in a country garden—or on a patio or sterile patch of grass as I am now doing. An inspiring meditation on gardening, an important work of anti-colonial literature, and sublime piece of nature writing

This is the third time I have read this book. It was once sort of escapist 'comfort' reading for me but some how this time I lost patience with the melodrama and histrionics and the weird pacing at the end.

I have re-read this book perhaps twice. This is not the same edition I have--which I purchased in Rome in 1999. It is fascinating to revisit this, now that I am the age of Mrs. Dalloway, and having lived in London for so many years--the book feels like it is part of me.

An extraordinary work of experiential archaeology & archeological psychogeography. Barthelmess' work with the sun and the tomb is groundbreaking in terms of our understanding of these ancestral spaces.