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Plot 29
‘When I am disturbed, even angry, gardening has been a therapy. When I don't want to talk I turn to Plot 29, or to a wilder piece of land by a northern sea. There, among seeds and trees, my breathing slows; my heart rate too. My anxieties slip away.’
As a young boy in 1960s Plymouth, Allan Jenkins and his brother, Christopher, were rescued from their care home and fostered by an elderly couple. There, the brothers started to grow flowers in their riverside cottage. They found a new life with their new mum and dad.
As Allan grew older, his foster parents were never quite able to provide the family he and his brother needed, but the solace he found in tending a small London allotment echoed the childhood moments when he grew nasturtiums from seed.
Over the course of a year, Allan digs deeper into his past, seeking to learn more about his absent parents. Examining the truths and untruths that he’d been told, he discovers the secrets to why the two boys were in care. What emerges is a vivid portrait of the violence and neglect that lay at the heart of his family.
A beautifully written, haunting memoir, Plot 29 is a mystery story and meditation on nature and nurture. It’s also a celebration of the joy to be found in sharing food and flowers with people you love.
As a young boy in 1960s Plymouth, Allan Jenkins and his brother, Christopher, were rescued from their care home and fostered by an elderly couple. There, the brothers started to grow flowers in their riverside cottage. They found a new life with their new mum and dad.
As Allan grew older, his foster parents were never quite able to provide the family he and his brother needed, but the solace he found in tending a small London allotment echoed the childhood moments when he grew nasturtiums from seed.
Over the course of a year, Allan digs deeper into his past, seeking to learn more about his absent parents. Examining the truths and untruths that he’d been told, he discovers the secrets to why the two boys were in care. What emerges is a vivid portrait of the violence and neglect that lay at the heart of his family.
A beautifully written, haunting memoir, Plot 29 is a mystery story and meditation on nature and nurture. It’s also a celebration of the joy to be found in sharing food and flowers with people you love.
274 pages, Kindle Edition
First published April 7, 2016
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460 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 51 reviews
February 16, 2018
First of all this has been a privilege to read. Ecstatic in his love of gardening and how it framed his life and was and is his anchor.
Not sure if I understand how anyone can read this book and not understand its parallel message. It had me smiling, sometimes in tears and often angry with the institutions that supposedly look after children. Also as I work on my own allotment I now see and feel the authors love of nature, nurture and life. A brilliant book.
Not sure if I understand how anyone can read this book and not understand its parallel message. It had me smiling, sometimes in tears and often angry with the institutions that supposedly look after children. Also as I work on my own allotment I now see and feel the authors love of nature, nurture and life. A brilliant book.
March 12, 2018
This is an unusual hybrid memoir: it’s a meditative tour through the gardening year, on a plot in London and at his second home in his wife’s native Denmark. But it’s also the story of how Jenkins, editor of the Observer Food Monthly, investigated his early life. Handed over to a Barnardo’s home at a few months of age, he was passed between various family members and a stepfather (with some degree of neglect: his notes show scabies, rickets and TB) and then raised by strict foster parents in Devon with his beloved older half-brother, Christopher. It’s interesting to read that initially Jenkins intended to write a simple gardening diary, with a bit of personal stuff thrown in. But as he got further into the project, it started to morph.
The book has a complicated chronology: though arranged by month, within chapters its fragments jump around in time, a year or a date at the start helping the reader to orient herself between flashbacks and the contemporary story line. Sections are often just a paragraph long; sometimes up to a page or two. I suspect some will find the structure difficult and distancing. It certainly made me read the book slowly, which I think was the right way. You take your time adjusting to the gradual personal unveiling just as you do to the slow turn of the seasons. When major things do happen – meeting his mother in his 30s; learning who his father was in his 60s – they’re almost anticlimactic, perhaps because of the rather flat style. It’s the process that has mattered, and gardening has granted solace along the way.
I’m grateful to the longlist for making me aware of a book I otherwise might never have heard about. I don’t think the book’s mental health theme is strong enough for it to make the shortlist, but I enjoyed reading it and I’ll also take a look at Jenkins’s upcoming book, Morning, about the joys of being an early riser.
[The cover image is so sweet. It’s a photograph from Summer 1959 of Christopher and Allan (on the right, aged five), just after they were taken in by their foster parents in Devon.]
Favorite lines:
“Solitude plus community, the constant I search for, the same as the allotment”
“The last element to be released from Pandora’s box, they say, was hope. So I will mourn the children we once were and I will sow chicory for bitterness. I will plant spring beans and alliums. I’ll look after them.”
“As a journalist, I have learned the five Ws – who, what, where, when, why. They are all needed to tell a story, we are taught, but too many are missing in my tale.”
Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.
The book has a complicated chronology: though arranged by month, within chapters its fragments jump around in time, a year or a date at the start helping the reader to orient herself between flashbacks and the contemporary story line. Sections are often just a paragraph long; sometimes up to a page or two. I suspect some will find the structure difficult and distancing. It certainly made me read the book slowly, which I think was the right way. You take your time adjusting to the gradual personal unveiling just as you do to the slow turn of the seasons. When major things do happen – meeting his mother in his 30s; learning who his father was in his 60s – they’re almost anticlimactic, perhaps because of the rather flat style. It’s the process that has mattered, and gardening has granted solace along the way.
I’m grateful to the longlist for making me aware of a book I otherwise might never have heard about. I don’t think the book’s mental health theme is strong enough for it to make the shortlist, but I enjoyed reading it and I’ll also take a look at Jenkins’s upcoming book, Morning, about the joys of being an early riser.
[The cover image is so sweet. It’s a photograph from Summer 1959 of Christopher and Allan (on the right, aged five), just after they were taken in by their foster parents in Devon.]
Favorite lines:
“Solitude plus community, the constant I search for, the same as the allotment”
“The last element to be released from Pandora’s box, they say, was hope. So I will mourn the children we once were and I will sow chicory for bitterness. I will plant spring beans and alliums. I’ll look after them.”
“As a journalist, I have learned the five Ws – who, what, where, when, why. They are all needed to tell a story, we are taught, but too many are missing in my tale.”
Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.
June 1, 2017
I struggled with this book. I really enjoyed the gardening descriptions and could understand the pleasure to be gained from the growth, tending, harvesting. I couldn't follow most of the memoir stuff. I found it confusing and hard to engage with because of that.
April 6, 2022
Two books about birth/germination, growth and death in in one as a gardener's year is interspersed with the author’s attempts to trace his birth father. One wouldn’t work without the other, as one would be too twee and one would be too desolate. Well worth reading (and do hang in until the end) although even as a keen gardener I did skim read some of the allotment sections (once you’ve read about one sowing of marigolds ...)
February 29, 2020
I just want to explain my rating for this well written and engaging book – I suppose I rate books based on whether I enjoy them and would read them again. I didn't choose this to read myself; it was a choice from a friend within one of my Book Groups and I'm always determined to finish these choices. However, I do regard my reading time as leisure time, and I want to enjoy my leisure time.
If you hit a certain age - and you have eyes, ears and a degree of empathy – it is almost inevitable that you will hear some of the horrors of childhood that some people you know have faced. You realise that it has a lasting impact on people's lives, and of their families. It can affect thinking, living, working, relationships, friendships etc.
I have nothing against this heartfelt memoir, but I already live in a world where people I know have had fucked up childhoods, and where therapy is the order of the day for those with social capital, and full blown care needs assessments are often required for those without that money or support.
Ideally I want to feel sleepy after reading so I can fall asleep at bedtime. I don't want to be having strange dreams about family dynamics. I compartmentalise to do this, and this was an intrusion on those self imposed boundaries - hence the average rating.
I thought his memoir was cleverly structured, and I think the memoir showed his grand resilience throughout his life, with matter of fact accounts of his dysfunctional upbringing, his unearthing of skeletons in the cupboard all interspersed with the toils and travails of a season or so on his beloved allotment.
I think his narrative of his brother, and life with and without him, was the most compelling aspect of the account for me. I'm not a gardener or a grower, and I got a little weary of all the slugs and composting etc, though I appreciated the juxtaposition of family and allotment reproduction, disease, decay and then regeneration.
I was so pleased to get to then end to see a happy ending for the author, not only utilising his talents with his successful career but also with an apparently loving family all around him. Obviously his brother had life limiting chances, and I suspect some of his other siblings too, but he did well to keep himself sorted with his family, work and allotment structures.
Overall though, he did get across how our social conditioning imposes a thinking that our families are at the top of our relationships tree, and that blood is thicker than water no matter what – a sentiment that I've never been convinced by - families are conditional!
If you hit a certain age - and you have eyes, ears and a degree of empathy – it is almost inevitable that you will hear some of the horrors of childhood that some people you know have faced. You realise that it has a lasting impact on people's lives, and of their families. It can affect thinking, living, working, relationships, friendships etc.
I have nothing against this heartfelt memoir, but I already live in a world where people I know have had fucked up childhoods, and where therapy is the order of the day for those with social capital, and full blown care needs assessments are often required for those without that money or support.
Ideally I want to feel sleepy after reading so I can fall asleep at bedtime. I don't want to be having strange dreams about family dynamics. I compartmentalise to do this, and this was an intrusion on those self imposed boundaries - hence the average rating.
I thought his memoir was cleverly structured, and I think the memoir showed his grand resilience throughout his life, with matter of fact accounts of his dysfunctional upbringing, his unearthing of skeletons in the cupboard all interspersed with the toils and travails of a season or so on his beloved allotment.
I think his narrative of his brother, and life with and without him, was the most compelling aspect of the account for me. I'm not a gardener or a grower, and I got a little weary of all the slugs and composting etc, though I appreciated the juxtaposition of family and allotment reproduction, disease, decay and then regeneration.
I was so pleased to get to then end to see a happy ending for the author, not only utilising his talents with his successful career but also with an apparently loving family all around him. Obviously his brother had life limiting chances, and I suspect some of his other siblings too, but he did well to keep himself sorted with his family, work and allotment structures.
Overall though, he did get across how our social conditioning imposes a thinking that our families are at the top of our relationships tree, and that blood is thicker than water no matter what – a sentiment that I've never been convinced by - families are conditional!
February 27, 2018
Jenkins beautifully unwraps his search for his past against the nurture he provides for his allotment bounty. We learn, as Jenkins alternates his consuming gardening with discoveries about his parentage and the carousel of neglect he received from birth. His childhood care reports gloss over abuse, ill health, childrens homes, foster families as Jenkins commits every available hour of his day to tend, save, protect and make his plot produce its best.
Although this is a very personal account, its bleak details of seeking a redemption in his past (and on Plot 29) is universal. Discovering where we came from and obliquely examining nature v nurture. Resilience however strong/weak the start in life (or in the soil) haunt the pages.
Painfully hopeful.
Although this is a very personal account, its bleak details of seeking a redemption in his past (and on Plot 29) is universal. Discovering where we came from and obliquely examining nature v nurture. Resilience however strong/weak the start in life (or in the soil) haunt the pages.
Painfully hopeful.
November 28, 2018
I read this mostly for work, given the alignment of the subject matter with my current research. And I enjoyed and admired it in many ways, but it felt very partial. If I’m honest I was bored by some of the repetitive gardening bits and I felt that the fragmentation of the parallel narrative about the author’s childhood was a little too difficult to follow in places.
January 7, 2019
A very beautiful book which mixes memory, longing, a search for belonging and gardening! Jenkins year of unravelling his childhood, the abandonment by his mother and his eventual discovery of his maternal and paternal family is told alongside the year on his allotment. At the end, he uncovers the truth that our family is that which we sow, grow and tend ourselves; the past cannot be changed only accepted
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March 6, 2019 I really enjoyed this book. The style of writing was so very different and compelling, temptingly leading you forward into the its pages.
To me it is a combination of reflections and a mans search into the background of his broken family and his roots. Quite emotions were conveyed with truth and feeling.
It is a search for legitimacy.
Gardening is the sanity thread hidden within these pages. I was fascinated by the way gardening was woven throughout the book - a kind of personal anchor. I could not put this book down.
To me it is a combination of reflections and a mans search into the background of his broken family and his roots. Quite emotions were conveyed with truth and feeling.
It is a search for legitimacy.
Gardening is the sanity thread hidden within these pages. I was fascinated by the way gardening was woven throughout the book - a kind of personal anchor. I could not put this book down.
December 19, 2020
This is definitely a rather strange book - part autobiography when he talks of his often dreadful experiences in foster care (aren't these places checked out?), his time at the allotment growing veggies for his grandchildren, and his experience with a psychoanalystist trying to explain his nightmares
I sometimes felt I should be keeping notes so I kept up!.
Interesting but not excatly a jolly read!
I sometimes felt I should be keeping notes so I kept up!.
Interesting but not excatly a jolly read!
April 12, 2021
This book tackles what it is to be human. What remains with me, after reading it, is a murky impression of months passing, the general muddle of sorting out bits of life, memories ever changing, and yet the garden somehow always grows. This book is captivating, not so much when reading it, but afterwards, it haunts the reader, much like the unknown in the author's life haunted him.
January 30, 2018
I couldn't sleep last night so decided to just accept that this book needed to be finished. I am so glad that a small item in The Guardian alerted me to this book. Gardening as therapy or rather as a place of safety.
August 5, 2021
A beautiful memoir. Although desperately sad in places, the parallels with gardening pulled you through (as gardening had with the author). Made me want to get into my own garden and plant some more seeds. Bonus point for his allotment friend being Derek Jarman’s Howard!
August 12, 2017
A moving, beautifully crafted memoir. I couldn't put it down until I finished it.
December 7, 2017
OK I am going to be brutally honest. A bit hacky in places - especially the gardening bits; writing designed to feel 'lyrical' but I was somehow not entirely convinced. Sometimes compelling; sometimes alienating. I think the whole gardening/life parallel was a little forced. I really wanted to like it as well but found it a little alienating - maybe the spare-house-in-Denmark thing; someone living a life I can't even imagine as I'm someone who has managed to end up with no house let alone a spare one, damaged by a not dissimilar childhood. Which is maybe why I identified more with Christopher and wanted to know more about him and precisely why and how the writer became detached from him. It wasn't really a book about Christopher, though - he was more a convenient trope; a lost boy to go in search of.
He captured the complexity of his feelings for Dudley very well. And describing his foster parents' world, that was a world I too remembered from the 1960s. The pure journalistic bits where he was tracking down the Barnardos' records was excellent and compelling. The gardening interludes were more than a little boring, at times (and I've been organic gardening since my rural 1960s' childhood, as well).
The contrast between his almost 'Swallows and Amazons' time with Dudley and Lillian, with his working class, Liverpudlian family was interesting. The conclusion though - after all that, that his real, true family was the cosy, middle class family he had made - was a little trite and annoying. As someone with a fairly catastrophic childhood that went from idyll to nightmare, I was really intrigued to read this book but ultimately found it irritating.
He captured the complexity of his feelings for Dudley very well. And describing his foster parents' world, that was a world I too remembered from the 1960s. The pure journalistic bits where he was tracking down the Barnardos' records was excellent and compelling. The gardening interludes were more than a little boring, at times (and I've been organic gardening since my rural 1960s' childhood, as well).
The contrast between his almost 'Swallows and Amazons' time with Dudley and Lillian, with his working class, Liverpudlian family was interesting. The conclusion though - after all that, that his real, true family was the cosy, middle class family he had made - was a little trite and annoying. As someone with a fairly catastrophic childhood that went from idyll to nightmare, I was really intrigued to read this book but ultimately found it irritating.
October 11, 2020
As a family historian, I always enjoy books – whether fiction or non-fiction – which are about someone’s search for their birth family. This is a story of two brothers caught up in the care system, and the impact that their childhood experiences have on their adult lives. Alan, the younger brother, is desperate to find out why their mother abandoned them, and to trace blood relatives. As the search for the truth gets more complicated and emotionally messy, he takes solace in his flourishing allotment, Plot 29, the surrogate family of gardeners who keep him company there, and the healing qualities of nature. I loved the lyrical descriptions of early mornings on the allotment, surrounded by burgeoning plants and a huge variety of wildlife, although by the end of the book this was getting a tad repetitive.
All in all, an engrossing read, but perhaps also a warning to those in a similar situation to remember that the truth you uncover is not always the truth you want to hear.
All in all, an engrossing read, but perhaps also a warning to those in a similar situation to remember that the truth you uncover is not always the truth you want to hear.
November 23, 2020
another amazing though really hard-hitting (and very sad at times) book about a fostered child, and his life, full of questions and queries about his parents and family. And the whole mixed with his astonishing ways to help himself - gardening ... both on an allotment in N London (the Plot 29 of the title) and at his wife's family neighbourhood I think) in Denmark. Ther relief and solace that open air growing, nurturing and sharing with nature and the environment is palpable and the book is a jumps between the two, the agony and the peace.
I really was moved.
I am so aware that both Allan Jenkins and Lemn Sissay re articulate and successful as adults, and have therefore been able to write their memoirs. I really feel for the many thousands who must never be heard, never resolve or even start to resolve their childhood traumas ......
I really was moved.
I am so aware that both Allan Jenkins and Lemn Sissay re articulate and successful as adults, and have therefore been able to write their memoirs. I really feel for the many thousands who must never be heard, never resolve or even start to resolve their childhood traumas ......
December 18, 2025
A memoir that starts as an allotment diary and becomes an exploration of a childhood, bouncing from social care to neglectful mother to ill-equipped foster parents to life at 16 in a B&B, and ultimately a search for birth parents. It’s bleak at times, and I have huge admiration for the author making something of his life, despite such an inauspicious start. The blame he places on himself for the lost relationship with his brother is so very sad to read.
I ultimately found myself much more invested in the personal history than in the allotment diary - and whilst I appreciate the allotment’s place in the narrative as a place of sanctuary, I have to confess I did not read it with the attention that I gave the rest. But perhaps without its calming interludes, I would have found the book altogether too bleak.
I ultimately found myself much more invested in the personal history than in the allotment diary - and whilst I appreciate the allotment’s place in the narrative as a place of sanctuary, I have to confess I did not read it with the attention that I gave the rest. But perhaps without its calming interludes, I would have found the book altogether too bleak.
March 5, 2018
Part of the book is a five star and part of it a two star but this is based on my personal preferences in liking psychological reflections more than gardening descriptions. I like Peter - his authentic voice triggered much compassion for him. He was seeking something/someone who couldn’t be found - those good enough parents who give us our sense of worth. He discovered his worth via hard work and introspection. There was a melancholy tone throughout which changed in the last chapter as he described the abundant love from spouse, children and grandchildren. I suppose he had to take the journey into his past to be able to see clearly his present.
Residual sadness for him and all the unloved children remains as I write this.
Residual sadness for him and all the unloved children remains as I write this.
September 23, 2020
Written from the heart and wonderfully descriptive. Allan Jenkin’s journey to uncover his background can best be described as a time of painful memories. Haunted by dreams which hinted at dark experiences he slowly uncovers disturbing facts about his mother and his early life before being put up for adoption.
His respite is time spent at Plot 29 a London allotment site where people come together to grow and where friendships are formed.
The story flip flops between time spent investigating his background and time spent tilling the soil in order to replenish his soul thus allowing him to build up mental wellbeing to continue probing the past.
His respite is time spent at Plot 29 a London allotment site where people come together to grow and where friendships are formed.
The story flip flops between time spent investigating his background and time spent tilling the soil in order to replenish his soul thus allowing him to build up mental wellbeing to continue probing the past.
October 3, 2021
Really lovely. I loved the gardening year theme and his meditative thoughts on life as reflected in plants and the cycle of growth.
The hints at what Allan’s siblings went through during their early life with their mother are sinister and terrible - Allan’s guilt that he couldn’t save everyone is obvious. But I also liked how Allan was able (at times) to feel real gratitude for what he has. This book is amazingly unpitying, soul cleansing in a way.
The hints at what Allan’s siblings went through during their early life with their mother are sinister and terrible - Allan’s guilt that he couldn’t save everyone is obvious. But I also liked how Allan was able (at times) to feel real gratitude for what he has. This book is amazingly unpitying, soul cleansing in a way.
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October 23, 2022A gift from my mum several years ago. I procrastinated over it for those years, never really sold on the prospect. Once I dug in, I found a captivating story written by an extremely likeable person, in a style I am most envious of. He managed to convey so much colour, all the right details. He did it with few words, short sentences, always enough.
I'll retain this book and revisit it to remind myself of his writing style.
I may add some thoughts and notes about the content at a later date.
I'll retain this book and revisit it to remind myself of his writing style.
I may add some thoughts and notes about the content at a later date.
July 21, 2019
Jenkins juxtaposes his love of allotment gardening with his abusive and neglected upbringing. The gardening sections were beautifully written but I found it difficult to keep focused on them as I was more interested in his childhood. Ultimately, I felt let down as a reader because it seemed he was building and building to a horrific climax that never quite materialized. Or maybe that's the point.
October 28, 2021
An exceptional book/memoir.
I am shaking with emotion.
I am a gardener and grower. I was not however ever exposed to the cruelty and loss the author experienced. But, I felt something in his search. I have searched for a grandfather. Lost forever.
A heartfelt exploration of a lost and damaged boy in the body of an older, professional man.
I will hold onto this book, not swap or share.
I am shaking with emotion.
I am a gardener and grower. I was not however ever exposed to the cruelty and loss the author experienced. But, I felt something in his search. I have searched for a grandfather. Lost forever.
A heartfelt exploration of a lost and damaged boy in the body of an older, professional man.
I will hold onto this book, not swap or share.
February 27, 2023
3.5
How harrowing to experience such a traumatic childhood and have to live with the adult realisation of some very dark events, circumstances and experiences.
I can't believe the behaviour of husband foster parents.
Gardening as a salvation particularly communal allotmenteering. Here's to calundula!
How harrowing to experience such a traumatic childhood and have to live with the adult realisation of some very dark events, circumstances and experiences.
I can't believe the behaviour of husband foster parents.
Gardening as a salvation particularly communal allotmenteering. Here's to calundula!
September 28, 2017
A somewhat sad book, it is nonetheless uplifting in the sense that the subjects gains much comfort from gardening an allotment. A good and stimulating book but I woulddstop short of describing it as truly memorable.
June 16, 2019
Another great choice made by Michele. A very moving story about the impact of growing up within a dysfunctional family - punctuated by the hope and calm brought about by a year round love of connecting with the soil.
June 14, 2023
Incredibly brave book
An excellent and moving book that shone a light on some of the repercussions of a disconnected childhood. The arbitrary cruelty is appalling all the more so coming from do gooders.
An excellent and moving book that shone a light on some of the repercussions of a disconnected childhood. The arbitrary cruelty is appalling all the more so coming from do gooders.
February 28, 2018
Delightful, moving, nothing else to say.
July 24, 2018
Unusual style as the book flips between different years throughout the book. Overall an enjoyable read. Was a moving tale and the author has shown courage in writing it.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 51 reviews