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A bold, tender exploration of how queerness and nature entwine – and what happens when we step beyond the binaries that fence us in.
There is a Q in garden, but you can’t always see it.
When Jenny Chamarette faced a devastating health crisis, they found themselves unmoored from the rules of gender, sexuality and productivity. In a small South London garden, Jenny began to imagine another way of living: porous, unruly, rooted in the lessons of soil and plant life. Gardens, like identities, are usually bounded – but what if those limits can be re-drawn?
Blending memoir and cultural criticism, this book asks whether the categories we inherit – colonial, patriarchal, conventions of sexuality and gender – still serve us, or whether they confine us. From illness and recovery to queer love and ecological wonder, Q is for garden invites readers to reimagine how we inhabit land, culture and each other.
An eloquent work of nature writing and queer thought, Q is for garden digs into the rich history of queer gardeners, botanists, artists and agriculturalists. It offers a hopeful vision of belonging, if we are curious enough to unearth it.
‘Passionate and expansive… a gardening book that enlarges our understanding of what tending the soil opens up for selves and societies, both.’
Tanya Shadrick, author of The Cure for Sleep
‘A generous and profoundly creative study of how all forms of life can learn to flourish in hostile climates, this book is an important work of queer scholarship and a beautiful companion through difficult times.’
Octavia Bright, author of This Ragged Grace
‘Vital, generative and tender. Reading this book has given me hope.’
Nancy Campbell, author of Thunderstone
‘Q is for Garden is a whirlwind memoir and cultural history, demonstrating that nature is indifferent to the categories we inherit – and that gardens have always been wonderfully queer, cultivating a freedom in all of us.’
Jack Wallington, author of A Greener Life
‘A defiant, tender and deeply generative work, where body and garden become interchangeable as a shared space for questioning what we inherit, absorb and accept as reality. Q is for Garden lays itself open with clear-sighted honesty, weaving deep knowledge and cultural history into something both rooted and radically reimagining. A powerful voice has entered the garden and made it their own.’
Victoria Bennett, author of All My Wild Mothers
prologue: broken earth
introduction
water::question?::autumn
1 Q is for garden (on heritage, passing and bothness)
2 kewrious (on queer bodies and transgressive gardening fashion)
3 arboretum, or the feeling of trees (on genderqueer forests and herb women)
earth::radix::winter
4 hands in the mud (on labour, gesture and earth connection)
5 compost (on medium, matter, mutter, mother)
6 roots and radicals (on recovery dreams, radical politics and rebuilding)
air::change::spring
7 seed/lings in space (on seeds, science fiction, speculation)
8 magnolia, fern (on prehistory, polygenderedness, erotics and shame)
9 hungry gap (on gardening, mortality and seasonal dearth)
fire::rage::summer
10 love in the mist (on wildflower meadows, queer kinship and grief)
11 tomato, skin, kin (on wolf peaches, persecution and wild edibles)
12 burn (on fire, flow and succession)
epilogue: verbena, knotweed, biopolitics (on queer art ecologies)
Index