My Garden, the City and Me

Top ten gardening book:

Babbs writes about her rooftop garden, where she grows as many edibles as she can fit in. She paints London gardening perfectly: it is all chimney tops, sirens and midnight watering, watching foxes run between buildings below her. She has a keen eye for the wild things that inhabit her concrete world. A magical book.

Featured as a highlight of London Christmas gifts:

For inspiration: buy a copy of My Garden, The City And Me by Helen Babbs. [...] Even if your gift recipient never get their hands dirty, it's a beautiful hardback, written deliciously, with top tips on where to find wild London as well as first-hand experience - successes and frustrations - of beginning urban gardening.

This sweet book is a reflective account of a young professional living in London and her attempts to become an aerial gardener [...] she delights in her little patch of wild amidst the mayhem of London - and that is the book's greatest appeal. "**** four stars"

Her heartwarming book covers her eco-journey, as she ultimately ventures beyond her garden to explore beachcombing and urban birding.

This isn't a ‘how to' guide, but it's an amiable and enjoyable account of her first year as a novice gardener, showing that even when living in an unrelentingly urban landscape, you can choose to transform the space you have into something slightly magical. A good book to give to city-dwellers who haven't yet discovered green living for themselves.

Book of the Week:

This charming book is a love letter to the capital's hidden green spaces and their wildlife.

It's the diary of a wide-eyed, novice rooftop gardener, and is about the glory of growing things and urban nature.

How much can be grown in such a tiny space? Well, it turns out to be quite a lot and Helen Babbs tells us about her triumphs and disasters. In between life on her rooftop garden, she tells us about the various community projects and initiatives she's discovered which take place in London. This is in complete contrast to the usual view of London as a faceless city, and shows there's thriving communities to be discovered if one only knows where to look.

Her lyrical entries, through the year she turned her tiny roof terrace into a garden, are a love song to the city as well as a celebration of the pleasure to be had from nurturing a seed to maturity.

This book allows anyone feeling disengaged from their natural heritage to pick a pathway back in, and not be afraid to do so.

In a sense it is ridiculous that humans need books to tell them where to find nature but making a connection with nature requires such a leap of imagination these days guides such as Helen have become invaluable. Helen's wilderness is in the detail she finds in her garden and on her various journeys: her first garden butterfly, the birds of prey she watches from tower blocks, the bark of the London plane tree, rooftop aviaries; so many small things to treasure. Just like this book. Pick up a copy and enjoy.

My Garden, the City and Me by beginner Helen Babbs [...] should inspire you to get started.

It's an inspirational and beautiful hardback peppered with inky illustrations and written with a serious sense of wide-eyed wonder at nature's resilience in the relentlessly urban capital. Underpinning the practicalities of rooftop cultivation and bold forays into the wilderness is the gradual transformation of the author herself in parallel with her roof. By the end of the book she is a confident nurturer of all things happy to be grown in containers with big ambitions for the roof's second year. She has also become a fully fledged urban cyclist and - most importantly - quit her day job to concentrate on her passions. Hence the book, for which we are glad. 

This little book is a hymn to the pleasures of city gardening, and of making your space, however unpromising, your own... would make a lovely present or inspirational guide... 

A lovely and inspirational story of a woman who turned the flat roof outside of her bedroom window into a rooftop garden.