My Family and Other Seedlings
A tender but substantive family memoir. Sunday Independent
An acute eye and a lightness of touch ensures that this is never anything other than truly engrossing. The Field
Joyful and life affirming. A warm, charming read The English Garden
A few years ago Lally Snow moved to a Dorset village with her husband and three small children, having spent over a decade as a war photographer, foreign correspondent and film maker living in Kabul.
In the late winter of 2021-22, she decided to rent an allotment, despite having only a rudimentary knowledge of gardening. She was starting from scratch and setting herself the dual challenge of growing an allotment at the same time as growing a family.
This is a heart-warming, wry and at times tearful account of Lally’s travails as a mother and novice allotment holder, counterpointing horticultural progress with the perils of parenting. Along the way she reflects on the drudgery of English rural domesticity after a professional life chasing war and adventure, the history of the allotment since Saxon times, and the wonderful moment when gardening becomes fun rather than just feeding a family.
Quercus Books 2024
War Gardens
A remarkable book. The Financial Times
Magically heartening. The Times
An extraordinary book…like a photograph magicked to life. Spectator
There can be few counter-narratives as enchanting and sad as those Snow recounts in War Gardens. TLS
Working in the world’s most dangerous war zones, Lalage Snow has often chanced across a very moving sight, a testimony to the triumph of the human spirit in adversity, a celebration of hope and beauty: a war garden. In Kabul, the royal gardens are tended by a centenarian gardener, though the king is long gone; in Camp Bastion, bored soldiers improvise tiny gardens to give themselves a moment’s peace; on both sides of the dividing line in Jerusalem families tend groves of olives and raise beautiful plants from the unforgiving, disputed landscape; in Ukraine, families tend their gardens in the middle of a surreal, frozen war.
War Gardens is a surprising, tragic and beautiful journey through the darkest places of the modern world, revealing the ways people make time and space for themselves and for nature even in the middle of destruction. Illustrated with Lally Snow’s own award-winning photography, this is a book to treasure.
Quercus Books 2018
Full Deployment: A Year in the Life of the Scots Guards
Menin House 2010
A photographic book charting a year in the life of one of the five foot regiments of the British Army on operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, German, The Falklands and in London.
