Main description:

The Town is the Garden (2017-20) was a three-year creative community food-growing project run by Deveron Projects, a socially engaged arts organisation in the northeast of Scotland. The project set out to explore how a rural agricultural town might begin to rethink its relationship to food and to food growing in an era of increasing awareness of climate and ecological emergency, from the community up. Through a collective investigation into the processes of learning and sharing skills related to food growing, the project explored how a community might also begin to pay better attention to the entanglement of human and more-than-human worlds. Food became a lens through which to investigate more broadly the dichotomies between culture and nature, ecology and economy that together with the colonial, racist and patriarchal systems have led to the current environmental catastrophes.

This set of six chapbooks captures the diverse creative learning programme developed through the project. Working with a range of practitioners that contributed to the project, the series includes critical texts, instructions and recipes, and poetry.

"Story" contextualises the project and includes an essay by art historian Elisabetta Rattalino on artists and art practices working with food and farming, alongside an introductory text on the project, written by Joss Allen and Caroline Gatt, the project coordinators and series editors.

"Compost" includes an essay by Maria Puig de la Bellacasa titled "Permaculture practices as ethical doings", which explores the relationships of care developed through permaculture practices illustrated through the example of making compost. This is paired with three compost recipes for making cold compost, hot compost and working with hugelkultur.

"Seeds" includes a text by Dawn Finch on practices of seed saving, blending seed saving instructions with poetry and a critique of the industrial seed economy. Dawn Finch is curator of a Huntly-based seed library developed through the Town is the Garden project, the Strathbogie Seed Collective, a poet and a children's author.

"Plants" includes a text by Eleanor Brown, an Aberdeenshire-based forager, which documents her foraging year through a number of recipes and anecdotes. This is paired with a text by anthropologist Alexandra Falter on plant-human relations; particularly those studied through her field work in the Bolivian Andes.

"Garden" includes a text by gardener and architect Joe Crowdy exploring queer ecology and role of plants and gardens in fostering human sensuality and intimacy. Joe delivered two workshops in Huntly on this topic, one with the local school's LQBTQ+ group, who the project has been supporting to develop a garden in the school grounds.

"Orchard" includes a text and series of drawings by Jonathan Baxter & Sarah Gittins on their project Future Fruit, commissioned as part of the Town is the Garden project. Future Fruit explores how an existing orchard could be rethought in response to the current climate and ecological emergency, particularly drawing on the work and theories of Patrick Geddes.

The original project had a very specific geographical focus in a literal sense but the themes are topical and universal - this set will appeal to anyone with an interest in the project principles and themes.

A stunning set of beautiful books; a thought provoking and and thoughtful gift for a friend, or for yourself.