Up the Garden Path

Audience: General

Language: English

‘Up the Garden Path: Gardening the earth, guarding the future’ is a joyful celebration of gardens, community and the quiet power of growing things. Drawing on a long-running column of the same name, Victoria Plum gathers chapters that range from the lively meetings of a gardening club in Reepham, Norfolk, to the unseen activity beneath winter soil.

The book blends humour, local storytelling and environmental insight. Across its pages, readers will find compost bins that never quite reach the temperatures promised, ponds of any size transformed into teeming wildlife habitats, weeds kept down without harsh chemicals, and a persuasive case for leaving ground to fill itself with growing things.

Running throughout is an argument about insects. Rather than waging war on the garden’s smallest inhabitants, the author invites readers to rediscover the magic of plants, the importance of pollinators and predators alike, and the role every gardener can play in protecting the future. Warm, wise and rooted in real experience, it is a book about plants, people and purpose in equal measure.

Illustrated with line drawings across 172 pages, ‘Up the Garden Path’ will suit gardeners, nature-lovers and eco-minded readers, and makes a natural gift for gardening clubs and community groups. One reader, the folk musician Richard Appleton, called it a gem, and the most intelligently written and entertaining gardening book he had read in years.

ISBN: 9781806057917

About the Author

Victoria Plum writes the ‘Up the Garden Path’ column for Reepham Life, the community website serving Reepham and its surrounding villages in Norfolk. The column has appeared regularly for years, reporting from Reepham & District Gardening Club meetings and summer shows while also covering composting, wildlife ponds, chemical-free weeding, smallholding productivity, and the case against insecticides.

That combination of close local observation and broader environmental thinking forms the basis of this first collection. Writing from a working garden rather than a laboratory, the author’s approach is practical, good-humoured and consistently on the side of the wildlife that shares the plot.

‘Up the Garden Path’ is distributed by Reepham Community Press, priced at £11.99, and is available by post and from stockists in Reepham, including Johnson’s of Reepham, Flower Folk and the Bircham Centre Charity Shop. https://reephamlife.co.uk/2026/03/05/new-book-digs-into-the-joy-of-gardening-and-community/