Lavie Tidhar’s Shelfie
I’m not sure how I first came across the Garden Gang. My local charity bookshop had one in store and there was something so... charming? Macabre? Delightfully bizarre? about it that I had to have it. Since then, they’ve saved me copies as they come in, so I am now in possession of a large, yet mercifully small in stature, collection of these strange little books.
And what are they, exactly?
It turns out that the Garden Gang were, and I am not joking here, huge in late 1970s England. They were written and drawn by the then 9-year old Jayne Fisher, and feature a
group of, well, fruit and vegetables with disturbingly human characteristics, who have a
simply delightful time going about their business. Did I mention they were published by
Ladybird, of all things?
Now, do they eat each other? I’m not sure, but I rather suspect they do.
And I have so many questions!
What was Lawrence Lemon doing on a plane to Switzerland? Why were the tomatoes
driving an ambulance? How did Patrick Pear manage to ride a donkey by the seaside?
I also have the hard-to-find annual, in its large format hardcover, an assortment of the
small individual paperbacks and hardcovers (each featuring two stories) and, to add insult to injury, a smaller collection of the Munch Bunch, a competing (and vastly inferior, he said huffily) series which even got its own short-lived television show in the 1980s.
At this point, I suspect I am the only person in the world collecting the Garden Gang
books. But who knows! Maybe there’s a whole secret society of us, gathering annually in
some secret garden (much like the strange Blackberry children) to admire the horrific face injuries suffered by poor Peter Potato, or to wonder at the glamorously alien Grace Grape. I am told on good authority that these books were absolutely beloved by children in the 1980s and, I must say, nearly fifty years later, I must love them just as much.
Not Lavie Tidhar
Lavie Tidhar’s latest book, The Three Coffin Problem, a collection of his Judge Dee vampire mystery stories, is out now. Sadly, it does not feature cannibal vegetables.
Shelfies is edited by Lavie Tidhar and Jared Shurin.
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