Digging Deep in the Garden: Book Three

‘‘Excellent, thought-provoking writing on being a gardener in the 21st century.’’

The silence of celebrities on climate chaos... growing your own biofuels to benefit bees... how to run your garden on renewable, modern sunlight... why nature-friendly organic gardening is bad news for big business... how slug pellets are polluting your cup of tea...

In this incisive, witty and thought-provoking collection of essays exploring gardening’s place in nature, John Walker challenges gardening’s status quo at a time of unprecedented environmental upheaval, while urging us to garden in ways that are truly green.

This third book of John’s garden writing was originally published in Organic Gardening/Organic Garden & Home, and then in Kitchen Garden magazine, as his long-running and popular series ‘Digging Deep’.

John Walker is an award-winning gardening and environmental author, writer, blogger and micropublisher with 40 years’ experience in practical gardening, teaching and the garden media. He grew up in the countryside, caught the gardening bug while still at school, and trained at Birmingham Botanical Gardens, Cambridge University Botanic Garden and the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, where he was awarded the Kew Diploma in Horticulture. He is also a qualified teacher. John was features/deputy editor of Garden Answers magazine and contributing editor of Kitchen Garden. John writes about organic, earth-friendly gardening for national newspapers and magazines, including The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph, and for the Royal Horticultural Society’s journal The Garden. His four collections of cage-rattling essays, Digging Deep in the Garden, explore gardening’s place in nature. A new and updated edition of Weeds: An Organic, Earth-friendly Guide to their Identification, Use and Control was published in 2016. John’s How to Create an Eco Garden: The Practical Guide to Greener, Planet-friendly Gardening was shortlisted for the 2012 Garden Media Guild Practical Book of the Year. He wrote The Bed and Border Planner, edited A Gardeners’ Guide to Annuals, and contributed to the Garden Organic Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening. John has won the Garden Media Guild Environmental Award three times, and has been shortlisted for Gardening Journalist of the Year three times. John is slowly making a new earth- and climate-friendly garden from a once bracken-riddled hillside at his edge-of-woodland home in Snowdonia, North Wales.