50% of cover price to #SaveCoton Orchard
Wassail! is not just a beautiful collection of poems, it is an opportunity to immerse yourself in this world. A world filled with cultural history alongside natural history. A world filled with community. A historic landscape that teaches us farming lessons for the future. I hope, having read it, that you too will fall in love with orchards.

Nicholas Gates
Author, Orchard: A Year in England's Eden

Wassail!
A poem cycle in celebration of orchards

Debbie Whitton Spriggs

Wassail! by Debbie Whitton Spriggs will be music to the ears of community orchard groups, those who love orchards, and anyone interested in saving our natural history and cultural heritage.

This poetic walk through an orchard year is accompanied by the author’s own illustrations, background notes, and a foreword by Nick Gates (Orchard, 2020). From a litany of apple varieties to a song for the Cubbington Pear, there are poems to chronicle and bless, protest and lament, celebrate and enchant.

The title poem has already been used at Wassail celebrations all round the British Isles, and the collection will lend itself to reading and performance – not only at Wassails, but at Blossom Days, Apple Days and other orchard festivities.

The poems were originally written in and for Coton Orchard near Cambridge, which is currently under threat from a transport development scheme. For each book sold, 50% of the cover price will go to #SaveCotonOrchard. Any unused funds will go directly to orchard projects.

Debbie Whitton Spriggs is a writer and academic, a Fellow of Wolfson College at Cambridge, and researches and writes about how we experience poetry (under the name of Debbie Pullinger). Since childhood she has been deeply interested in nature, which creeps into much of her poetry writing.