Rhapsody In Green

by Charlotte Mendelson

Gardening can be viewed as a largely pointless hobby, but the evangelical zeal and camaraderie it generates is unique. Charlotte Mendelson is perhaps unusually passionate about it. For despite her superficially normal existence, despite the fact that she has only six square metres of grotty urban soil and a few pots, she has a secret life. She is an extreme gardener, an obsessive, an addict. And like all addicts, she wants to spread the joy. Her garden may look like a nasty drunk old man's mini-allotment, chaotic, virtually flowerless, with weird recycling and nowhere to sit. When honoured friends are shown it, they tend to laugh. However, it is actually a tiny jungle, a minuscule farm, a wildly uneconomical experiment in intensive edible cultivation, on which she grows a taste of perhaps a hundred kinds of delicious fruits and odd vegetables. It is a source of infinite happiness and deep peace. It looks completely bonkers. Arguably, it's the most expensive, time-consuming, undecorative and self-indulgent way to grow a salad ever invented, but when tired or sad or cross it never fails to delight.

Genres: Nonfiction, Gardening, Memoir, Nature, British Literature

208 pages, Hardcover

First published September 22, 2016

About the author

Charlotte Mendelson (born 1972) is a British novelist and editor. Her maternal grandparents were, in her words, "Hungarian-speaking-Czech, Ruthenian for about 10 minutes, Carpathian mountain-y, impossible to describe", who left Prague in 1939.
When she was two, she moved with her parents and her baby sister to a house in a cobbled passage next to St John's College, Oxford, where her father taught public international law.

After the King's School, Canterbury,she studied Ancient and Modern History at the University of Oxford, even though she knows now, with great regret, that what would have suited her best was English literature at somewhere like Leeds.

She says she became a lesbian suddenly. "It was boyfriends up to 22 or 23. Not a whiff of lesbianism. Not even a thought. But I'm very all or nothing. It was all that, and now it's all this. There was about a 10-minute cross-over period of uncertainty, but it was really not that bad."

She has two children with the journalist and novelist Joanna Briscoe.

She won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 2003 and the Somerset Maugham Award in 2004 for her second novel Daughters of Jerusalem. She was shortlisted for the Sunday Times 'Young Writer of the Year Award in 2003.She contributes regularly to the TLS, the Guardian, the Independent on Sunday and the Observer. She is an editor at the publishers Headline Review. She was placed 60th on the Independent on Sunday Pink List 2007

Reviews

[Jane · Rating 5 out of 5]

Admission: I only bought this book because it amused me to read TWO British gardening books with the exact same title at the same time. The first - an olio of Beverley Nichol's best garden quotes - was
a pleasant romp through work I know well, but the second, by unknown (to me) novelist Charlotte Mendelson, was a revelation and a delight. And Beverley would have approved of Miss Mendelson, for she is a garden addict of the first water - and she writes like a dream, with mordant humor and a rueful sense of her own insanity over seeds and slugs in a small patch of a London garden. I laughed out loud a couple of pages in at this sentence: "'Oh, roses!" said every visitor. "How lovely!." Idiots." But I knew I'd found a kindred spirit when I read this: "Books made me; they are my favorite inanimate object; my salvation, and probably, my doom. They isolate and comfort; inform and distract; my childhood was built upon them. Adulthood would be unthinkable without them. And gardening, I swiftly realized, gave me an excuse to visit a whole new bookshop section."

[Karen Wellsbury · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this, mainly because it mirrors my own gardening experience.
Charlotte Mendelson describes so accurately the obsession with gardening, especially in a small space with limited experience and almost everything in pots.
Several plants were bought while reading this book

[Karen Mace · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a keen gardener myself, I adored this book!! I found myself on way too many occasions recognising my own irrational behaviours when it comes to the world of gardening and how a simple hobby transforms you into a raving maniac at times!

This is a real book for real gardeners! It understands the struggles and realities of gardening with restrictions of plot size, but never in your ambitions of just what you 'think' you can grow! And you really get the passion that the author feels for the subject as it takes you through so many topics - gardening catalogues, seed buying addiction, the hatred towards garden pests, the thrill of germination, gardening clothes - just to name a few! I think it's one of those books I'll be going back to over the years to feel that I'm not alone in my thoughts about gardening! How it can drive you to despair one minute, and then bring you so much joy the next!

Charlotte is a gardener who prefers to grow things to eat so it's also fun to hear her thoughts on how she tries to plan ways of expanding her garden menu, and it's also written with humour! It takes you through a year so points out the highs and lows of each season, the dreams and realities that each month brings and the never ending list of things to do!

And it was also nice to know that I'm not the only gardening who thinks certain ways about other gardens! As the author writes ' despite the chaos of my own garden, i feel entirely justified criticising everyone elses'!!! Yes to this!!!

So if you're a gardener, or you know a gardener, then I'd highly recommend this book as you or they will 'get it'!! The obsession, the erratic behaviour caring for your plants creates, the joy of compost and the art of plant watering!! It's all there and I loved every page!

[Simone · Rating 4 out of 5]

A delicious, juicy romp through Mendelson's obsession. She is charmingly self-deprecating while also utterly convinced of the basic rightness and importance of her own (often questionably and hilariously evolved) opinions. Her language is as fertile as her tiny urban garden: "... as all thinking persons know, there is nothing like petrichor. Petrichor is the compound released when rain falls on soil, named (romantically) after the Greek words for stone and the lifeblood of the gods and derived (less romantically) from chemicals secreted by plants during dry weather to inhibit growth. It makes one close one's eyes and inhale elemental breaths: water, decay, rust, life." (p. 69)

If that doesn't make you want to get into the garden and rootle around with manure and watering cans and quivering, hopeful freshly-sprouted plants, then I fear you're just dead inside. Or rational. Mendelson has convinced me that I, too, can create a verdant urban food garden, and spring is just around the corner.

[Daniel Myatt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well this was an absolute delight to read.

There were parts where I laughed out loud at these gardening misadventures so much that my stomach hurt! Charlotte writes like my friends and I chat, excitedly and passionately.

This is the type of gardening book that I would recommend to all my green fingered friends and also those that can kill a daisy with one look :)

A great read and enjoyable book

[Kitten Kisser · Rating 1 out of 5]

I really wish I looked into her other books before ordering. None of them have good reviews... This book was off to a good start & even had me laughing out loud. But it quickly became a slog. The author does nothing but self deprecate to the point where it doesn't feel genuine, but rather that she is doing it to come across as relatable or not a snob. Of course I could totally be missing the mark, but the point is, it stopped being fun & became an annoying bore.

I also had a heck of a time trying to visualize her tiny garden area. It's small. Okay. It has a wall that slugs live in. She sees it out her kitchen. That's it. She rips up flowers, plants stuff, kills stuff, deals with bugs, weather etc. Got it. All stuff every single person who grows anything outside deals with. We all have our successes & mistakes. On one hand the author seems like she works her fingers to the bone but it just keeps failing, but then in another comment she admits to neglect. This is a common theme.

As a full time eco farm girl, I expected to relate strongly to this book & in some ways I did, but the writing style really grated on me. Eventually I had enough & stopped with only 1/4 of the book remaining. I seriously have so many other books I'd rather spend my time reading. So far out of the incredible amount of books on the topic I've read over the past 2 decades, 'The Dirty Life' by Kristen Kimball is my favorite. I love the book so much, I even got myself a signed copy & the audible version. This book however, is not a keeper. Not for me anyway. I've had enough of this woman prattling on & on about herself.

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rhapsody in Green is a solid 3.5 star book, but I'm rounding up because I can relate to Charlotte Mendelson and appreciate what she was trying to do with this quirky little memoir -- even if it got slightly out of her control by the end.

Ms. Mendelson's garden is a little patch of ground behind her London town house, but she has stuffed it full of plants -- mostly edibles, and what seems to be a particular fondness for exotic Asian greens. It's messy and overflowing, but bursting with the enthusiasm Mendelson's dreams have poured into it, even if she sometimes loses focus and bumbles the execution.

Which, naturally, is also a perfectly apt description of this memoir.

Mendelson packs her every sentence with twining words and elaborate constructions. Her enthusiasm for nature is contagious, and I started this book absolutely adoring the way she conveyed the almost tactile smells of plants. This passage in particular resonated with me:

"Other people are so peculiar. You see them all the time, walking past their neighbour's front gardens, by great clouds of scented clematis or huge bosomy fragrant roses roses, and do they sniff? Even hesitate? Ripe blackberries may be lolling at them through the railings, bird cherries so close they have only to lift a hand, and they do not break step: not a nibble. I have never [...] heard a grown woman being begged by her children not to dawdle on the way to school ... except me.

"It is mystifying. Nature is everywhere, in the playing fields we cross near the station, municipal flower beds, tops of walls; why doesn't everyone want to taste and smell it, roll it in their fingers, ingest it, to keep them alive?"

I don't share Mendelson's burning passion for all plants edible, but this is very much how I feel about nature in general -- always pulled towards it, and wanting to get outside to breathe in all the lovely smells. When we go on family hikes, I'm the one saying, "What if we just went a little ways further, just around that bend, to see what the view is?" while my husband sighs with superhuman patience and reminds me that if we don't get the kids back to the car in time, the afternoon will be a disaster. It is only with reluctance I turn my feet around, telling myself it's ok because I'll be back someday. Right?

But eventually I will get tired and seek rest. And that's what happened to me with Mendelson's writing; it became too much. As the chapters went on and on, I started to find her style less charming, and more ... manic. She seemed to lose focus, as if she was just slap dashing words onto the page, but never really following through with an idea. Like her garden, I became overwhelmed by the choking profusion of words that too often lacked a sense of organizing purpose. Her hectic descriptions about her garden's stresses and failures started to make ME feel stressed and discouraged. By the end, I felt as if I was a guest who had greatly enjoyed the first hour or so of my visit with Mendelson, but was now exhausted and eagerly looking for an excuse to go home.

I was also slightly miffed when Mendelson bungled the following Laura Ingalls Wilder reference:

"What escaped me was the small matter of necessity; in when in Farmer Boy Laura wrote, 'There was no rest and no play for anyone now. They all worked from candle-light to candle-light. Mother and the girls ... were drying corn and apples, and making preserves,' it wasn't because Ma and Grace and Laura needed a bonding activity and couldn't agree on a box set, but a response to seasonal plenty and year-round want."

The problem here, of course, is that Farmer Boy is NOT about Laura's family -- it's about the childhood of her husband, Almanzo Wilder, who grew up on a New York farm. "The girls" in this passage are Almanzo's mother and sisters, not Laura, Ma, and Grace. Oh, and what about Mary and Carrie, by the way?

Overall, though, I thoroughly enjoyed vast stretches of Rhapsody in Green, and the first third in particular. But really, it needs a pruning just as badly as Mendelson's garden does. I think I would have been content with just 100 pages or so.

[Mia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Within Rhapsody of Green, Charlotte Mendelson writes a beautifully heartwarming book about one of her great passions - gardening. Being interested in the topic myself, heavily influenced by my grandparents, it feels a personal read with an immediate friendship between the pages. Perhaps in that, the pivotal aspect to this book is its relatability and how down to earth it is; Mendelson doesn’t pretend to be anything she isn’t which is so refreshing!

I can’t count how many parts made me laugh, smile or grin. This book reached me in ways I couldn’t have imagined, and in a strange way I feel I’ve found a friend. Mendelson paints an honest picture of gardening much unlike typical ‘perfect’ ones seen on TV or online. She interweaves anecdotes, painfully relatable admissions, horror stories, failures and experiences to create the epitome of my love of non-fiction.
I truly enjoyed the experience of reading this book, and would recommend it to both gardeners and non-gardeners alike!

’And this is how it should remain; an unfulfilled fantasy: never disappointing, always possible: a source of perfect, fruitful happiness.’

[Katy Wheatley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This reads like a series of articles, which means that you can dip into these whenever you have a spare five minutes. The author takes us on a circuitous journey through her obsession with gardening and the complications of doing it in a tiny, city space. If she were interested in growing flowers this wouldn't be too much of a problem but her passion is for things you. can eat, and for that you need space, or the ability to focus on one crop and be delighted with eating kale 12 months a year. Mendelson does not do this. Her obsession and passion cause her to sprint from new thing to new thing, always trying something out, always experimenting and rarely, it seems, getting anything she grows to produce enough to feed even one person. If you're a keen gardener you will delight in this as Mendelson, despite her protestations, clearly knows her stuff. If you're an amateur and you're hoping for tips, I think you'll find plenty of warnings of what not to do and as you progress you can recall just how bonkers some of this gardening really is.

[Joana · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely hilarious and relatable gardening book! Loved it. The only downside was that the author often gave hints about certain gardening procedures but didn't develop, as this isn't a teaching manual, so I was left wondering and needing to know more.

[Giordana · Rating 4 out of 5]

I waited for the end of winter to read this, just when Spring is round the corner. It's a collection of essays about the author's passion for her garden. It's refreshingly not a "how to" guide, and it is written with a lot of humour. Charlotte Mendelson has an eye for the minute details that make up the natural world - the descriptions are very evocative.

[Dale · Rating 4 out of 5]

For plant lovers and gardeners... a conversation with a kindred spirit who has a passion for plants and books, and a reassuringly perfectly imperfect garden. My own garden is a mess... courtesy of summer rain... that has also sanctioned rainy afternoons spent in the good company of her essays.
Would've earned an extra star had drawings of the garden been included, and had I been certain the author's opinion of permaculture was entirely tongue-in-cheek.

[Victoria Mills · Rating 3 out of 5]

The passion for gardening portrayed by Mendelson's narrative is infectious. As a fellow gardener, I deeply identified with the narrator's (often misplaced) horticultural hopes. However, I think that the formatting of the narrative as a full-length novel often reduced the narrator's genuine enthusiasm to repetitive drivel. At certain points, it felt that the narrator was trying to reach a word count on a short prose project. Honestly, the book might have been a compelling collection of free verse poems, had the author chosen to format it as such. Overall, the novel is perhaps worth picking up to read a section or two that is pertinent to the current season, but it does not hold up as well as a whole.

[Jennifer · Rating 2 out of 5]

I did enjoy this book for the language and smile-inducing points of connection and for the fabulous cover. But it is tempting to be cynical about the reasons for its existence and I don't think it is too unfair to describe it as merely OK, especially as I was irritated as much as entertained. It reads like a collection of newspaper columns or blog entries and is almost a 'one joke' premise "Ooh, aren't I mad?" I did recognise some of the phenomena, not all of which have been extensively rehearsed by others already, especially the reluctance to harvest in a timely fashion and the abysmally low productivity.

[Todayiamadaisy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to like this so much more than I did. This is a bed-book, a series of short chapters following a year in a tiny London garden. There was a lot I did like — it's very funny in parts, and gave me some ideas for further reading — but I found it leans too heavily on her being so zany, wanting to grow VEGETABLES, for my liking.

[Keli · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m sad to say that I didn’t enjoy reading this book. I really wanted to... I’ve read other books by Charlotte Mendelson before and enjoyed them. The front cover and book description are both very appealing. I’m into gardening and growing my own food and thought I’d love this book. I thought I might learn something too.

I found the book to be almost a stream-of-consciousness style of writing. You know when someone is talking at you ten-to-the-dozen and you have no idea what they are saying? They talk a lot but say nothing … Yep. Exactly that. I found myself re-reading the same lines, paragraphs, and even pages, a few times as I couldn’t remember what I’d just read. I even questioned if I’d actually read those lines, paragraphs, pages at all. It’s like something inside of me switched off. My head hurt from all those words.

Mendelson does make some good points, such as questioning if growing our own food is really better for us, considering the time and hard work involved, the air and soil pollution, exhaust fumes, dust, household filth and all of the complex poisons involved [nods in agreement]. There are some excellent recommendations for further reading at the back of the book. It wasn’t the worst book I’ve ever read. I did laugh a few times too but … … …

[Teri-K · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this book, as I'm a huge fan of gardening memoirs - and I like them quirky. Vita Sackville-West at Sissinghurst doesn't interest me as much as someone trying to make a garden out of a rocky hillside in the wilds or tiny side yard in a city. And this one is definitely quirky, as a young woman who knows nothing about growing things decides to start a garden in a small, mostly paved London backyard.

Some of the entries here are delightful, but eventually the book foundered under her whining, (I get enough of that from the resident 3-year-old these days, it really exasperated me), and the puzzling fact that she wants to grow food for her family but ends up leaving everything on the plants until they rot. I get that sometimes you're not sure if a food is ready to be picked and you wait too long, but she repeated talks about the foods that she was "afraid to pick", and refused to touch until it rotted away.

I'm not sure if the negatives were being exaggerated to be funny, but it didn't read that way. Instead this book just became annoying and I can't recommend it.

[Kate O'Shea · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm not a gardener. I haven't even got a garden. What I have is a collection of herbs in a "plot" the size of two bin lids. Plants here have to fend for themselves. I ignore them and consequently they run riot.
I bought this wonderful book because Lucy Worsley recommended it.
I loved it. Ms Mendelson reminds me so much of my mother whose garden has been a vegetable and fruit garden, a playground and her pride and joy even though it now provides her with more work than she admits to. Charlotte Mendelson's book is wonderful. It tells of the same crazy longing for unsuitable plants my mum has had for 60 years. It is funny and entertaining and interesting and even informative (if the information you seek is not to let Ms Mendelson anywhere near your fruit trees).
Read it. It's well worth it.

[Alexa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ok- I loved this book. Adored it. I'm keeping it forever. I have a garden myself- rather small, which I love to excess, so Charlotte's book resonated with me (how I wish we could have tea together, possibly in a garden, to discuss our failures and triumphs. Sadly, gardens tend to be heavy on the failures, but at least they make for good stories...)

I could visualize Charlotte trying to scamper off with illicit stolen plums (I think it was plums) and cramming various plants into her already full garden, because I do stuff like that.

If you love to garden unwisely and intemperately, or just want to read about someone who does, this is the book for you. It's fun; it's touching and it's hard to put down. I think I read it it almost one go- and would have finished it in one day but my family demanded food.

[Angela · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is entertaining in small doses. The author is obsessed with trying to fit as much as possible into her small city garden and researches unusual varieties of plants [mostly vegetables] to try. I would have liked some photos or illustrations of the actual plants but I guess you could google them.

Her failures seem to outweigh her successes but it is still a tribute to the therapeutic value of getting away from other cares and pressures, putting your hands in the soil and observing the cycle of life.

Mendelson recommends other gardening books and I followed up with two comprehensive non-fiction books by Joy Larkham on salad crops and edible and inventive displays which were useful.
She also recommended Karel Capek and I have one ; Letters from England , [1924/25] but havent read it yet, looks good.

[Kristen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was my favourite read so far this year. A delightful book that captures the reality of backyard gardening so precisely, with such humour, that I laughed aloud on every page, alternating with punching the air with my fist and shouting "Yes! Exactly! Someone gets me!" She knows the humiliation of having to buy zucchini from the grocer, the danger of drool-inducing seed catalogues, the reluctance to go on vacation just when the green beans are coming on, the desperation when you get only male squash flowers, the desire to taste every single variety of apple, the reluctance to pick perfect squash, and the secret shameful pride of harvesting three whole blueberries from the garden. Such a lovely book!

[Dymphy · Rating 1 out of 5]

January of 2017, I walked into Waterstones London with every intention of buying a book. This cover looked really pretty, and I hoped that this book would give me some tips or insights into gardening.

Boy, was I wrong.

This book details Mendelson's adventures into gardening, including foraging that one plum tree on that particular spot. Unfortunately, the humor in this book doesn't do it for me, nor the content. It was just a collection of thoughts and calling it a "rhapsody" might be an overstatement.

The illustrations are gorgeous though.

[Jacqueline Howell · Rating 3 out of 5]

On most levels this is a very entertaining book, full of wit and there is more than a hint of the reader's self-image in her writing and her observations really made me laugh out loud a number of times! However - and I was disappointed that there was a however - I became bored with the countless references to plant species and found myself skipping and skimming over the latter sections of the book but I did finish it and am glad I did. She is an excellent writer, I will definitely read more of her work and I have put her 2013 novel 'Almost English' on my 'want to read' list.

[Kirsten Lost 2022 · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this. Charlotte captures the mad, joyous, ridiculous hobby of gardening. Gardening makes you superstitious. I planted these tomatoes after the weird snow last year and got a great harvest, therefore I must plant these after a weird snow this year. Planting onions next to cabbages will drive the cabbagefly away because they stink. These egg shells will keep the slugs away. None of it proven, just passed down, person to person, because it worked once. Gardening is amazing, and this book bleeds the passion for it!

[(a)lyss(a) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I received a copy of this book through the Amazon Vine program in exchange for an honest review.

This is a cute read!

We follow the author as she learns about gardening. As an American I enjoyed reading not just about the authors life, but how gardening and the culture around it is different in England. The author is self-deprecating and honest about the work that goes into growing food. Her observations are funny and relatable and her passion for gardening is clear.

Overall a nice and interesting read!

[Emma · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author’s writing is fun and quick and charming. I ended up reading the book sort of as a series of essays, picking it up and putting it back down over the course of a month or so. It’s a celebration of eccentricity. It isn’t a page turner, but it is a witty read for anyone who is into gardening. I think I prefer the author’s essays, but I am glad that books like this are written and published... If that makes sense.

[Allison L. · Rating 4 out of 5]

For an avid gardener, this book was not only hilarious but hilariously accurate! I commiserate with Mendelson on so many of her failed gardening exploits and really enjoyed reading through her yearly garden segments. There was some British jargon I didn't know which made it a tad difficult to interpret at times but still very fun for me!

[Joan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a hoot! Its daft funny and helpful all in one go. Her garden is STILL bigger than mine though so I still managed to have garden-envy. Its one long joke about anting more than we have but its not tiresome and I learnt stuff along the way. Its refreshing to read how NOT to do something for a change

[Deirdre · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really a book of essays, v short essays.

I ought to have read it slower! The tone was a bit too much when gulped down in chunks, like eating a chocolate bar all at once. But I enjoyed it: there were some laugh-out-loud moments, some beautiful moments, and many grins of recognition and understanding.

[Rosie Owen · Rating 3 out of 5]

liked this less as it continued. felt like it got bogged down in lists and words that just didn’t conjure anything in me poor horticulturally-ignorant brain. love the structure, the tiny little chapters with musings on different subjects is gorg, but just ended up feeling vvv repetitive. would love to give this 2 and a half stars but goodreads won’t allow it :/