Jenny Chamarette is a writer, curator and cultural critic shortlisted for the Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay and Nature Chronicles Prizes and longlisted for the Nan Shepherd Prize. Their essays have appeared in This Allotment and Queerphoria, and they regularly collaborate with artists and galleries on interpretive and critical writing. Jen is also Commissioning Co-Editor for the MAI Feminism and Visual Culture imprint of Punctum Books. When not writing they are usually in the garden or the allotment.

• prologue: broken earthintroductionwater::question?::autumn1 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::winter4 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::spring7 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::summer10 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

‘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