The book I should have written

A rather momentous day came this week. I sold my last ever copy of Grow & Gather. Not before time, I hear you say. It was published in 2021. It really is time to move on and let go. You're right, it is.

I've been mulling for a while on the second book. My publishers wanted me to write it straight after the first, but I was too bruised. Not by the process – I am rarely happier than when I am writing, but because I hated the paper on which they printed the first book. I went to the publishers' office in Southwark before I signed the contracts and the only assurance I sought from them was that they would print it on thick, non-shiny paper. I was picturing Nigel Slater's later works (of course) but also Gill Meller's books. We share a publisher, so I didn't think this was a great reach.

[Sadly, I also did not to get to share his photographer. Another regret. Andrew Montgomery is a genius.]

When the first copies of the books arrived for me to check, I was struck by the non-thickness and the non-mattness of the paper. I sighed and signed, and we all let it happen.

But the book that never was, the matt, heavy textured, printed in charcoal ink in a Garamond-esque font, remained an itch that hadn't yet been scratched. I thought I could put together my weekly newsletters, all three hundred of them, into a bound volume, as a record of my life in the garden. Like The Morville Hours, or a very 21 century Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady.

But whilst the minutiae of my days and weeks and months might prove of passing interest, it lacks either life lessons or a plot.

So maybe the companion piece to Nigel's Tender: Volumes one (vegetables) and two (fruit). Surely the world needs a three (flowers)? With a moody and underexposed image on a jacket over linen, letter pressed covers. The odd dark, glossy photograph between blotting paper pages. This could have been so good. All my dreams.

However, my fantasy future does not involve being sued for intellectual property infringements, so I shall leave that one on the shelf.

Sweet peas I thought. I could write the book on sweet peas. I've already started, so it was just a means of trying to find someone to photograph it properly and keep their promises about paper weights and gold lettering. (Link to the Gather library here, keep scrolling down.)

But then oh woe is me. Someone else wrote it first. I snoozed and I lost. I couldn't even be cross because it's Phil Johnson, who sold me my first ever huge sacks of sweet peas back in the day. It was complete chance that I put in a speculative order for his Piggy Sue, and look where that ended.

In line with the scale of his sweet pea production, this is a hefty book. I hear a rumour it's 1.4 kilos and, although I do know quite a bit about our lovely Lathyrus odoratus, I'm not sure it would weigh that much even if I wrote it all on very heavy paper.

But as I niche increasingly down from general gardener to biodynamic and organic producer of garden-adapted sweet pea seed (it's been quite the journey), I feel like I should celebrate a big day in the sweet pea world. I should be there. So I am spending my Sunday at the book launch of A World of Sweet Peas at Wisley. It is an insanely long way to go for the day, but I have never been one to shy away from an epic. And all of that driving means a lot of thinking time. I might even come up with the idea for book two.

Ideas on a postcard.