Rosie Boycott’s grow-your-own food revolution – London, England

By Liz Hoggard
London Evening Standard
June 11, 2009

Rosie Boycott — career feminist, newspaper supremo and Mayor Boris Johnson’s “Food Tsar” — is proof you can start gardening at any age.

She was 51 before she picked up a spade. “Six years ago, I’d never grown a single vegetable,” she laughs.

Like many frazzled Londoners, she thought growing your own was some boring activity reserved for dullards and oldies with nothing better to do. Back then her life was full of smart parties and TV appearances. The first female editor of The Independent newspapers, she socialised with actors and politicians. In 1998 she became the editor of the Daily Express. But then in 2001 she lost her job when the paper was acquired by Richard Desmond.

She bought a smallholding in Somerset with her husband Charlie, a London QC. But overwhelmed by emptiness and depression, Boycott, an ex-alcoholic, started drinking again after 22 years.

In 2003 she was involved in a drink-driving accident, breaking her leg so badly that doctors feared she might lose it. She checked into the Life Works therapeutic community in Surrey and began to realise that work had become a substitute addiction.

Convalescence, which took 20 months, left her re-evaluating her life completely.

Hobbling around on crutches, she found one of the few things she could do was garden.

“I had to switch my head out of the hurry and have it now’ culture,” she tells me.

“All I could do while my leg healed was make sure I ate muesli and exercised according to doctor’s orders.

It was fantastically difficult, but gardening became incredibly important.

It taught me patience — when you plant a seed you can’t do much, all you can do is water it and give it the right soil and sunlight.

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