Just when I thought I had read all the books by John Seymour that were pertinent to me I came across another. "The Self-Sufficient Gardener", which I should have discovered sooner, was referred to in Paul A.Lee's "There is a Garden in the Mind" - his memoir of Alan Chadwick and the Organic Movement in California.
Published in 1978, two years after "The Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency" (1976), this is a sequel to that classic. My hunch, no more than that, is that this will have been commissioned by the publisher Dorling Kindersley. John Seymour was an expert in growing vegetables, but from reading his other books I suspect that (a) he preferred the larger canvas of the farm, (b) his wife Sally, a remarkable lady who has recently passed away, was the true authority when it came to the art.
This is still an excellent book. I was very pleased to discover many references to Alan Chadwick within it. Seymour, like his friend Fritz "Small is Beautiful" Schumacher held Chadwick and his ideas in the highest esteem. He refers to Chadwick's "raised beds" as "deep beds"; and "double-digging" as the creation of "bastard trenches". This might be Seymour's translation of the original terms from French Intensive market-gardening from whence these concepts originated. I was especially delighted to read Seymour referring to Chadwick's disciple John Jeavons who I interviewed for "The Garden."
Worth the price of entry alone are the exquisite colour illustrations of fruit and vegetables the illustrator of which, sadly, is not credited.
When I interviewed Seymour's daughter Anne in 2023 she mentioned Tao Wimbush and the nearby Lammas Commune and I included this in the book. My curiosity piqued, this summer I visited Lammas in South West Wales on one of their rare open days and swapped books with Tao himself. His story of the commune's foundation, the pioneering example of Wales' stringent "One Planet Development", is a rollicking good read.
Subsequent to our meeting Tao made a video which doffs its hat to Seymour and the era which I chronicled in "The Garden". Check out some of their other videos too. Tao is a true rebel.