Reading to accompany different element of the Seeding the Commons programme
Into the Wind with the Seeds
PRACTICAL GUIDES
Back Garden Seed Saving
Sue Stickland
The Organic Seed Grower: A Farmer’s Guide to Vegetable Seed Production
John Navazio
Seed to Seed
by Suzanne Ashworth
NOVELS
Down the Garden Path
Beverley Nichols
The Seed Keeper
Diane Wilson
MEMOIRS
Garden Notebook
Beth Chatto
Modern Nature
Derek Jarman
Gathering: Memoir of a Seed Saver
Diane Ott Whealy
OTHER NON-FICTION
The Cabaret of Plants
Richard Mabey
First the Seed
Jack R. Kloppenburg
The Carrier Bag of Fiction
Ursula Le Guin
The Mushroom at the End of the World
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
Sacred Seeds (New World Plants in Early Modern English Literature)
Edward McLean Test
The Globalization of Wheat: A Critical History of the Green Revolution
By Marci Baranski
Monocultures, Monopolies, Myths and the Masculinization of Agriculture
Vandana Shiva
The Origin of Cultivation and Proto-Weeds, Long Before Neolithic Farming
Ainit Snir, Dani Nadel, Iris Groman-Yaroslavski, Yoel Melamed, Marcelo Sternberg, Ofer Bar-Yosef, Ehud Weiss
Recommendations from the Seed Sovereignty team
The Hidden Life of Trees
Peter Wohlleben
Climate Justice
Mary Robinson
Healthy Crops: A New Agricultural Revolution
Francis Chaboussou
Arctic Dreams
Barry Lopez
The Living Mountain
Nan Shepherd
The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot
Robert MacFarlane
The Overstory
Richard Powers
English Pastoral
James Rebanks
WEBSITES
www.seedsovereignty.info/ – the Gaia Foundation’s Seed Sovereignty programme
www.seedingthecommons.org – a project by Custom Food Lab
Entangled Roots
List Compiled by Francine Hajilou
To the Sea
This week’s reading looked closely at identity, belonging, and connection with the natural world as an act of healing, reclamation and self-love.
At The Water’s Edge
an essay/life writing by Louisa Adjoa Parker.
From ‘swims’ (an extract)
by Elizabeth-Jane Burnett
I Belong Here
by Anita Sehti (Google Books preview prologue only pages 9-19)
Video: Interview with Anita Sehti.
(Watch from 8:24 to hear the author reading the prologue from her book, I Belong Here)
To the Hills
The reading for this walk came from The Willow Herb Review‘a digital platform to celebrate and bolster nature writing by emerging and established writers of colour’. The selected texts focus on themes of place and home.
Rotten Perfection
by Prasanthi Ram
Goodbye House
by Samantha Cheh
Finding a Way Out: Lost in East Gippsland
by Christina Ng
To the Garden
This week’s reading included reportage and an extract from memoir. Focusing on growing food as a radical and healing act that connects us to ancestral knowledge, Black and POC led community food initiatives, and politics around indigenous foods.
Unearthed: On Race and Roots and How The Soil Taught Me I Belong
by Claire Ratinon. (Google Books preview, intro only)
Various articles from Gal-Dem:
Stuffed: the fight to decolonise Indigenous foods
Stuffed: how Sinead Browne is redistributing surplus restaurant food while eliminating waste
Nature is healing: how radical gardening offers a future free from land exploitation
Short Film
Masai Woman Builds Beautiful Off-Grid Homestead