The family bat

The family bat

My mother, Susan Bulmer, has a bat named after her. Bulmer’s Fruit Bat, Aproteles bulmerae. It’s a giant fruit bat from the remote highlands of New Guinea. And it used to be extinct, but probably isn’t. As a young woman, before she was tied down with children,...
Name dropping

Name dropping

Names hold power. Our personal names are vectors, co-ordinates by which we locate ourselves in time and space, relationships, culture and more. I’m still bearing the names I was given at birth: Alice Mary Bulmer. It’s not a very harmonious collection of names. For...
My life with green salad

My life with green salad

This is the story behind my new book, Meet your greens: Enliven your salads with herbal energetics. It’s about how to make amazing salads, but it’s also about a lot more than that. Meet Your Greens comes out of my lifelong interest in the different flavours of salad...
Better Leap Tidy

Better Leap Tidy

This is a post about three books that have changed my thinking. They’re somewhat outside my usual bedside reading material. None of the three includes any recipes or organic gardening tips. None mentions Albus Dumbledore or the Beatles. But they’ve all had a profound...