EVERY WEEK, WE bring you a round-up of the best longreads of the past seven days in Sitdown Sunday.
For the next few weeks, we’ll be bringing you an evening longread to enjoy which will help you to escape the news cycle.
We’ll be keeping an eye on new longreads and digging back into the archives for some classics.
Esiah Levy started a seed-sharing ‘empire’ from his home in Croydon, England. His story is not just about him, or his love of gardening, but about the power of seeds themselves and what they stand for.
(Ruby Tandoh, approx 34 mins reading time)
For the Levy children, the family garden in Thornton Heath wasn’t a warm initiation into a family tradition. When I talked to Syreeta, she remembered the garden feeling like a forbidden place. It was John’s domain: somewhere plants were tenderly coaxed into bloom but children were shooed away, or worse. “Sometimes me and [Esiah] would play football together in the garden. But if the balls went into the plants, then it was game over for both of us.” Having arrived in the UK from Jamaica when he was only a child, John would spend much of his adult life this way: turning the earth, awaiting the seasons, sowing familiar seeds in strange soil. In the garden, he was magnanimous. When it came to tending to his own flesh and blood — unruly, talkative, inquisitive — he was less merciful.
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