Today Virginia is chatting with Anne Helen Petersen, author of four books and co-host of the Work Appropriate podcast, who also writes the newsletter Culture Study—and its recently launched little sister, Garden Study. We're exploring how gardening can be part of perfectionism and productivity culture—or its radical undoing. 

If you want more conversations like this one, please rate and review us in your podcast player! And become a paid Burnt Toast subscriber to get all of Virginia's reporting and bonus subscriber-only episodes—including the director's cut of this conversation where VA and AHP answer all of your gardening questions. 

Disclaimer: Virginia is a journalist and human with a lot of informed opinions. Virginia is not a nutritionist, therapist, doctor, or any kind of health care provider. The conversation you're about to hear and all of the advice and opinions she gives are just for entertainment, information, and education purposes only. None of this is a substitute for individual medical or mental health advice.

BUTTER & OTHER LINKS

the reader survey

the Sunset handbook

Monty Don as “gardening god” and fashion icon

clematis pruning groups

growing vegetables for a lot of diet culture reasons

Great Dixter and the Vita Sackville West garden

The Optimization Sinkhole

renovation culture

diet culture happening in garden culture

Duluth Trading Co overalls

overall shorts from Target

a gardeners tool belt

A Good House for Children by Kate Collins

throw pillows from Anchal Project

FAT TALK is out! Order your signed copy from Virginia's favorite independent bookstore, Split Rock Books (they ship anywhere in the US!). Or order it from your independent bookstore, or from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Target, or Kobo or anywhere else you like to buy books. You can also order the audio book from Libro.fm or Audible.

CREDITS

The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith. Follow Virginia on Instagram or Twitter. Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing. The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe. Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell. Tommy Harron is our audio engineer. Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!

Episode 104 Transcript

Our gardener origin stories:

Anne

I grew up in a house that had a ton of gardens. My mom’s a huge gardener. I grew up in really arid Idaho, not in the mountains—actually the lowest point in Idaho. But my mom had over 250 roses and a huge vegetable garden and all sorts of things and planted all of it herself because it was a vacant lot before we built our house. So, many of my memories as a kid are “oh, your mom’s out in the garden.” And I was not really interested in it at the time. I was not that kid was like, “Mom show me how to plant a pea,” or whatever. There were some flowers that I liked in the garden. I really loved the bleeding hearts. And then when I graduated from college, I came to Seattle and was a nanny for several years and I got so bored when we were out walking. You know, the two year old that I was walking with, we talked to about trucks and stuff like that.

Virginia

There’s only so much discourse there. 

Anne

This was before phones, so I couldn’t even be a bad nanny and look at my phone all the time. I just had my own mind. I would go on a walk 2-3 times a day in this little Seattle neighborhood and I learned all of the plants. The parents of the kiddo I was nannying for had a Sunset handbook, which is the bible of gardening out here in the West. Also, the house that I was living in at the time with my friends had a pretty substantial garden. I was like, okay, I’ll do some gardening out here and that taught me a lot about those plants. Then when I was in grad school, the first place that I lived in Oregon, I had a pretty robust vegetable garden that was really fun to do. And then I moved to Texas and I was like, I know nothing. 

Virginia

Oh wow, totally different. 

Anne

I tried to grow some things on my balcony. It was horrible, just abysmal, and I didn’t garden again. Then I did a little bit of vegetable gardening in Montana, especially during the pandemic, like a lot of people. But then I moved to an island off the coast of Washington that had an incredible, luscious garden that was really mindfully put in by the previous owners of the house. It has like 40 to 50 rhododendrons and azaleas that succession bloom. It has a climbing hydrangea that’s 40 feet tall and probably 40 feet wide. There’s several of them that come together seamlessly.

Virginia

Which is ancient, those grow so slowly! Rhododendrons and climbing hydrangeas are some of the slowest things to establish.

Anne

It was probably planted in the 1960. And I’ve just fallen in love with gardening, like deeply in love with it, the last couple of years. 

Virginia

I love this.

My origin story is also mother-related. My mom is British. Gardening is the national pastime there. And it’s a big part of mainstream culture in a way that it’s just not here in the United States. (See: Monty Don as “gardening god” and fashion icon.) So my grandfather was a really serious gardener, my aunt, my cousins, just that whole side of my family. And I wanted nothing to do with it, like, zero interest as a kid and a teenager and even throughout my 20s. You getting interested in plants at 24 I feel like is quite a child prodigy with gardening.

Ann