Caribbean-born, British-based writer and gardener Marchelle Farrell is the author of Uprooting: From the Caribbean to the Countryside, Finding Home in an English Country
Garden.
A medical doctor by training, Marchelle's work unflinchingly surveys her own journey to life in an english country garden and along the way surveys the richness of the contributions of the African diaspora to our modern gardening world - contributions made willinging and unwillingly, seen and unseed, acknowledged and unacknowledged these many years past.
Known as Afroliage on-line, Marchelle's weiting, gardening-story-shared, and new home-deeply-rooted-into is both healing and re-integrating for her and for us - in that way in which our gardens can be our very best health care.
Uprooting is both powerfully personal and simultaneously universal.
"Born in Trinidad and Tobago, Marchelle has spent the last twenty years attempting to become hardy here in the UK. She has trained and worked as a consultant psychiatrist and psychotherapist, and is deeply curious about the relationships between our external landscapes and internal ones, the patterns that are reenacted in the human relationship with the land, and how they might be changed. When not neglecting it for the care of her young children, or her work in the community, Marchelle spends much of her time getting to know her country garden in Somerset, and writing about the things the garden teaches her about herself."
​Her debut memoir, Uprooting, won the 2021 Nan Shepherd Prize for nature writing, and is published by Canongate.
Enjoy this almost-winter warm-wander of a conversation.
All images courtesy of Marchelle Farrell. All rights reserved.
You can follow Marchelle's work on line at: www.marchellefarrell.com/
and on Instagram: @afroliage
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JOIN US again next week, when just in time for the Winter Solstice here in the Northern Hemisphere, we're joined by gardener, educator, and children's book author Collin Pine. His early childhood picture book, illustrated by Tiffany Everett, is The Garden Next Door. It reminds us all - young and older alike - that all of our gardens are next door to someone. It also asks us, perhaps, to consider as a result, what kind of community are we growing there? Listen in!
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