Photographer Benedetta Ristori meets migrant women who tend small gardens in Berlin’s Kleingärten (allotment gardens). She presents these little gardens as places where displaced people can put down roots again and probes the effects of migration today in her portraits, still lifes and urban photographs. The choice was made to allow the photographs to speak for themselves and to not give the reader any further context, apart from the title. Which raises the question of whether the photographs are capable of putting across the theme of displacement and re-rooting by themselves. The white spaces on the soft, greyish paper serve to activate the tenderness in the photographs.
Such small decisions taken make You don’t need soil to grow a striking book: the double centre stitching in yellow thread; the green sheet of Buckram used for the soft cover; the foil print in yellow and white on the cover; and the horizontal page layout. Five daisies shoot up out from the half-polyester, half-cotton cover. A soft image that complements the warmth of the book’s content: everyday nature in an urban environment where people who are far from home find solace amidst constant change.