Jenny Mollison: Harry goes to sleep dreaming of what he will grow next year

MY highlight this week has been seeing Carlo D’Alessandro’s photographic exhibition of allotment gardeners in the John Hope Gateway at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh.

IF anyone out there hasn’t yet grasped that growing on an allotment has so many benefits to it beyond food, they should take time to be converted by this powerful exhibition.

According to Carlo, allotments are “a sort of backlash against the trappings of this modern world and the need to keep hold of a tradition that increasingly has to fight for its relevance in a society populated by plentiful access to food from cheaper and easier sources”.

For the past year, Carlo has immersed himself in every aspect of allotments. He has been working with the now complete Glasgow Allotment Heritage project. At the same time, he has been documenting dozens of other allotments in the Central Belt, talking to plotholders, making recordings and taking pictures. This exhibition is about the characters he met. We’re not told the geographical location of the sites, nor is it relevant.

The exhibition is stunning not only because of the beautiful images of allotmenteers but also for the quotes accompanying the pictures. Each plotholder sums up in a nutshell what their plot means to them. There’s a photograph of Harry who says that nowadays instead of his stressful job keeping him awake at night, he goes to sleep dreaming of what he will grow next year. Isabella, on my own site and dwarfed by enormous stalks of rhubarb, says she grows plants especially for dyeing her spinning wool. And then there’s Gert, a former prisoner of war who’s had a plot since 1953. The message of the exhibition is that tending a small patch of land can transform lives in so many ways.

But the photograph and quote which made me laugh out loud came from John, who goes to his plot with his wife and dog and says, “I just dither about.” I know that for a lot of us, the joy of having a plot is as much to do with dithering about as anything else.

To complete the allotment experience, the exhibition includes a full-size allotment hut where you can sit down and watch a film of some of the people in the photographs talking to Carlo.

• Scotland’s Allotment Gardeners runs until 15 April, free, 10am-6pm, John Hope Gateway Ground Floor, RBGE.