AUTHOR & ACTIVIST, ALYS FOWLER - 'PEATLANDS'
Banner - Y Migneint, Ysbyty Ifan, Snowdonia
National Trust: John Miller
29 May 2025, 7.00PM
DOORS OPEN 6.30
REFRESHMENTS
VENUE: SIOP LYFRAU’R SENEDD-DY
OWAIN GLYNDŴR PARLIAMENT HOUSE
MACHYNLLETH
what a treat to welcome Alys here on the publication date of her new book
‘Peatlands’
in partnership with publishers, Hachette
Author and activist, Jay Griffiths
The value of peat bogs as a natural resource and haven of biodiversity is undisputed, yet few of us have been lucky enough to experience their beauty and richness. In Peatlands, Wainwright Prize-shortlisted author Alys Fowler calls for us to sink deep into the dark, black soils of these rugged places and take a close look at the birds, animals, plants and insects that live within them.
Living in North Wales next to a huge peat bog makes Alys Fowler’s Peatlands both personal and illuminating. Her odyssey takes her deep into the Flow Country, to the remote Border Mires, up the Brecon Beacons and the Peak District, creating an intimate picture of these magical places and the people who care for them.
“Why do I like bogs so much? I think it is because I feel very at home with them, I think this has something to do with my queerness and their queer nature as a space.”
Alys Fowler is a gardener and an award-winning journalist who has written for the weekend Guardian about gardening and the environment. She has eleven books, including Hidden Nature, which was shortlisted for the Wainwright prize in 2018. It is likely that a few of Alys’s books on growing: Eat What You Grow, The Modern Herbal, Abundance, The Thrifty Forager, will already be on your shelves. Her first work of fiction, The Woman Who Buried Herself, was published in 2021 by Hazel Press. Her writing has also been anthologised in the new nature writing anthology, Gifts of Gravity and Light, also published in 2021.
Alys trained in horticulture at the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew and the New York Botanical Gardens and it is through her love of plants and ecology that she came to writing. She has written for numerous publications including the National Geographic, the Observer, the Guardian, Time Out, Gardens Illustrated, Red Magazine and Country Living.
Alys workshops on everything from writing about water to how to identify plants. She also teaches garden history, specialising in Italian gardens of the
Renaissance era.