Sokol's Garden
More time in the garden, less stress in life
Fifty years of gardening, in fifty square metres of London.
136 pages. PDF ebook - download it straight away, read it on any phone, tablet or computer.
Sokol Peja's garden is ten steps across. It holds flat-trained apples and pears, two crops of figs a year, grapes, lemons, olives, twenty-six roses, and a fish pond that used to be a water tank.
He has been gardening since he was eight and he is seventy now. This is the first time he has written any of it down: how he does it, what went wrong, and a calendar of his whole year.
He calls the garden his medicine. You come home full of the day, you sit down in it with a coffee, and the problems wait outside the gate. He says the book will have done its job if one person reads it and starts, in a small garden, on a balcony, or with one flower in a pot.
Filmed with BBC Gardeners' World, July 2026
Inside the book
- 1Where I Come From
- 2Finding Your Passion
- 3The Garden Is My Medicine
- 4Planning Your Garden
- 5Fruit Trees
- 6Vines
- 7Figs
- 8Vegetables
- 9Flowers
- 10Roses
- 11Evergreen Trees
- 12The Pond and the Fish
- 13Slugs and Snails
- 14Watering
- 15Final Words
- Sokol's Year the whole book as one calendar, January to December
Fifteen chapters, thirty photographs from the garden, 136 pages.
"Please start. It doesn't matter if you have hundreds of plants, or tens, or five. Start something."
About Sokol
Everything in this book grows in one small London garden of about fifty square metres. Ten steps, corner to corner.
Sokol Peja was eight when his mother spent money she did not have on flowers her sons could not eat, and he has been gardening ever since - across Albania, balconies in three cities, and finally the garden behind his London home, where he now grows what people say cannot be grown here.
Followed on Instagram by the thousands he calls his flower family, he has written it all down for the first time.
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Come into the garden
136 pages, thirty photographs, everything Sokol knows.
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