Mark Watson

From 1999-2024, Dark Mountain’s Mark Watson taught and demonstrated the art of holding a dialogue with (mostly) wild plants. Part-manual, part-memoir, this small book is a distillation of his hands-on practice, ‘hanging out’ with twelve flowers and a tree over a year: from a conversation with burdock in a community garden, to lying alongside sea kale on the Suffolk shore, to foraging for mallow leaf fritters and flower teas.

For thousands of years the arts of fermentation have transformed and preserved raw food in cultures across the world. Yet even though some of our strongest and most loved flavours – coffee, chocolate, cheese, salami, olives, as well as soy, miso and tempeh, wine and beer – are still alchemised via the life-death-life process of bacteria and yeasts, live, fizzing vegetables can be a challenge. 

The Grassroots Directory is a new source book that aims to showcase the most innovative, practical and exciting community-led projects in the UK.

…making space for nature goes beyond the world of nature reserves, wildlife documentaries or even pilgrimages into the wilderness.

It just so happened that the five of us who turned up at Richard’s on Wednesday morning in Bungay to learn how to do dead-hedging with Paul were all over 50, and so the ad hoc name we came up with for that morning’s grouping was the NR35 Dead-Hedgers Society – the Over 50s Contingent!

Growing plants, particularly for food, and particularly in community, is a big part of the Transition experience and ethos. Many people in transition are active permaculturists. At the very least, most of us want to eat plants grown organically from good seed.