Today we continue our conversation with Emma Cooper, author and gardener, whose latest book, Jade Pearls and Alien Eyeballs, is due out on May 1st. Emma also graciously did a reading for us, which is another wonderful way to preview her work. You can also read my review. Enjoy! - JB
How
did you do most of your research for the historical section? Was it
part of your thesis work or other on-going research?
I
wrote most of the book, including the historical section, before I
went back to university to become an ethnobotanist. In 2009, Carolyn
Fry brought out a lovely book in association with Kew, called The
Plant Hunters, which is a potted history of plant hunting, and
that was very useful for my research. It’s a topic of interest to
me, so I’ve done a fair bit of reading on it!
I
thought it was utterly fascinating to hear how plants wandered about.
It reminded me of something Michael Pollan posits at the beginning of
one of his books: did we choose the plant or did the plant choose us?
(He was thinking of corn, of course.) It is an idea that stuck with
me. What do you think makes these unusual edibles appealing but has
kept them from becoming more popular?
This
is a very interesting topic, and one I did learn more about during my
dissertation research. It’s also a very complicated question. There
is no simple answer. The chilli pepper, for example, was very easily
adopted into cultures all over the world, and that may have been
because its use as a spice was both familiar and highly prized at the
time. The potato struggled, and that may have been because it was
unfamiliar – the Europeans had no tuber crops at that time. The
potato also suffered from associations with its poisonous relatives
(although the chilli doesn’t seem to have), and got embroiled in
religious arguments. Once it was adopted by the Irish it became a
Catholic food, and was therefore not overly popular with the English
Protestants.
The
Europeans who found the New World and wanted to conquer it had an
agenda, of course. They opposed any native foods (like quinoa) that
had religious aspects to them, or which were particularly key to a
society they were trying to dismantle. And there are still prejudices
against ‘peasant’ foods. Vanilla, which was exalted by the
Totonac people and demanded as tribute by the Aztecs, had a very
different fate. It and chocolate, which was considered divine and
used as currency, had no problem becoming popular in the wider world!
There
have always been economic factors involved. Quite often new foods
would be adopted by society’s elites, and then slowly filter down
to the rest of the population as they became more widely available
and therefore more affordable.
In
Chapter 4 you write: "In short, there's a place for native
plants in gardens, but it's not the veg patch." Could you
elaborate on that a bit? For me, especially as I'm turning more and
more towards permaculture, it seems there is plenty of room for
native plants in the veg patch to, for example, support pollinators
and stabilize soil. I was really shocked to read that and would like
to hear more of your thoughts about that.
We
may have different perspectives on this issue because we’re from
different places. In the UK, it’s very hard to say what is and what
isn’t a native plant. Even the ones that have been here for quite
some time only arrived at the end of the last ice age. And we’re a
long way from a biodiversity hot spot. We just don’t have the range
of indigenous crops that you find in the Americas, for example.
The
point I was trying to make in the book is that the native vs.
non-native plants debate does not belong in the vegetable patch.
Here in the UK, if you tried to grow a kitchen garden of native
plants, you’d get pretty hungry. The research shows that non-native
plants can be just as good for wildlife, and stabilize the soil and
do all the things you want them to do. So my advice is to chose your
plants on the basis of their utility, not their origin.
I
was also surprised at the lack of photos. Was that just the pdf
version?
No,
you get the same book content in all of the different ebook formats,
and there are no photos. There’s a real tendency these days for
people to consume media in lieu of actually having an experience. We
lap up cookery shows, but fewer and fewer of us bother to cook. We
love nature documentaries, but rarely wander outside. We ooh and aah
over photographs of lovely gardens, whilst sitting on a concrete
patio and pruning the occasional shrub. Although I describe Jade
Pearls and Alien Eyeballs as a kind
of guide book to unusual plants, it doesn’t have glossy pictures of
them because the whole point is to get people going out and finding
them, growing them, eating them. I want to encourage curiosity and
motivate people to have new experiences, not spoon-feed them
everything and sate their appetite with images. It’s not a
coffee-table book. It’s not eye candy. The books I loved most when
I was a kid (and I was a real bookworm) were the ones with words, not
pictures. They exercise your imagination.
How
did you find your contributors?
I
put out a call for contributors on the blog, way back in 2010. Some
of them came via that, and I asked people I had already encountered
on social media. Being immersed in the unusual edibles community, I
was already familiar with the main players (on and offline), although
it was nice to be able to feature some new faces.
What
was the best part about working on this book for you?
The
best part of working on the book was reading the stories that people
sent in for inclusion. I have contributors from all over the world,
and it was fascinating to learn what they considered to be unusual,
the plants they were growing and the ways they were learning about
new ones. You don’t get that in most gardening books, and even if
you know these people on social media, those stories very often don’t
come out (or you learn them very slowly).
Why
did you decide to go the route of self-publishing? Your last book,
The Peat-Free Diet, was also self-published. What's the appeal of
that process for you?
I
imagine that there’s a rather niche audience of this book, and that
I would have had trouble attracting the attention of a publisher for
it. Self-publishing also allows me to stay in control of the process,
and to write the kind of books that I want to write. I learn about
the process every time I do it (and hopefully get better at it!), and
it’s a far more personal journey.
That’s
important for this book in particular, because it’s a very personal
project. It didn’t start out that way, but because of the way my
life went over the last few years, I had to shelve it more than once.
At the beginning of this year I felt, very strongly, that I was in a
position to finish it and to get it out to the people who might want
to read it. I didn’t want it to be languishing on my hard drive for
ever more.
And,
in a very real sense, self-publishing is what I do. I produce a blog,
and a podcast, and all of that I do by myself. Self-publishing a book
just feels like an extension of that – a new journey.
Where
can people find your book?
For
the time being, the easiest place to find it is at Smashwords where you can read a preview of the book. From 1st
May you’ll be able to buy a copy there, in whatever ebook format
you like, as well. But the book will also be available from various
ebook stores, including iTunes and it’s already available to
pre-order in the Nook store.
What's
your next project?
There’s
actually another complete book on my hard drive that nobody has seen,
and I’d like to publish that in due course. And I’d like to do an
ebook version of The Peat-Free Diet,
which is currently only available as an audio book. But for the
immediate future my next project is going to be getting back into
gardening, which has been another thing that has been on hold through
changing circumstances. I have seeds germinating on the windowsills,
and an allotment to cultivate this year, so that’s definitely the
next thing on the agenda.
.JPG)
