Notes from a Polish Allotment by Alex Rossiter

Prose, haiku, and drawings by Alex Rossiter

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“Crossing the allotment patio to wash my brushes at the outdoor sink one morning, I saw to the southeast a plane descending towards Warsaw’s Chopin airport, and remembered how I’d originally made my own way, via tarmac and boulevard, to the neighborhood where we were to live. Surrounded as I was by the enormous idea of Poland, and the slabbed expanses of its capital, I found myself unpacking a need for gardens.”

Which Alex Rossiter, in Notes from a Polish Allotment, proceeds to do across a haibun weave of prose, haiku, and pencil drawings divided between the book’s two parts: the first covering the transplanted artist’s arrival in Warsaw, the second, his discovery of the allotment gardens, a quirky Arcadian wedge of greenery in the heart of the city’s Mokotów district.

Attuned to the moods of mud, lancing of light, and shivers of vine across the seasons, and with a healthy interest in the idiosyncrasies of his fellow allotmenteers, Rossiter adopts a typological approach softened by empathic curiosity. Throughout, he seeks to locate himself while reflecting on what it means to be a foreigner sinking hands into local soil.

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Listen to Alex Rossiter read “An Education in Mud,” a chapter from Notes from a Polish Allotment.

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Notes from a Polish Allotment goes well with Alex’s Coffeepots, a zine of drawings and autobiographical prose-recipes. There is an option above to purchase both together at a discount.

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2023
Edition of 500
136 pages, paperback, 12×17 cm, color offset, sewn & glued
Printed on Arctic Munken Print Cream 115 and Pure Rough 300
Designed by Pilar Rojo and Stefan Lorenzutti
ISBN 978-83-965968-5-7

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Alex Rossiter is an artist and writer originally from Bristol, UK. A painter and collagist, he has worked variously as a baker, postman, chef, and illustrator. He is the author of Notes from a Polish Allotment and Coffeepots, both from Bored Wolves. A memoir, Bread and Houses, Or, How I Came to Know the Parks of East Bristol, is forthcoming from BW in 2024. He currently lives on the Baltic coast of Poland.

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Peculiar Jungle (Notes from a Polish Allotment extract)

As an antidote to life in Warsaw, the color and vivacity of the allotments had caught our attention. The space of them had opened our eyes so wide that we went about acquiring one at the end of May, along with the allotment’s domek, or “little house.” Monika was at work while I got a grip on the basement ghosts and next gathered the dead spiders and bees from the back room in order to evict them.

Maintenance completed, I walked around the allotments and observed the equanimity of gardens. From the pathways, you took peace in, and then reflected some of the serene indifference back at this odd nature. Asparaguses and ferns were unfurling, berries grew along fences and trellises, and the immature cones of conifers throbbed pink and green on the spring breeze.

In this allotment wedge of greenery, in the heart of Warsaw’s Mokotów district, our plot occupied a central position where one felt suddenly far from the quotidian world of cities, and safely hidden as if in a peculiar jungle.

Sitting there, I saw that there was a kind of logic in having everyone’s gardens in the same place together, especially those of apartment dwellers in blocks. But far beyond logic was the expanse of imagination which a gardener employed working in their own secret garden.

Then time passed and, thinking to write about the gardens, things started to look different, because you had to skirmish with the private battles and methods and whims of each gardener. And also you had to treat their spirits like children in Arcadia.

Though each parcel was quite private and unique, I began to understand some of the whispering stories which nonetheless passed amongst the branches and bushes…