The Backyard Parables: Lessons on Gardening, and Life - Hardcover

Roach, Margaret

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1455501980 ISBN 13: 9781455501984

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing, 2013

Synopsis

Margaret Roach has been harvesting thirty years of backyard parables-deceptively simple, instructive stories from a life spent digging ever deeper-and has distilled them in this memoir along with her best tips for garden making, discouraging all manner of animal and insect opponents, at-home pickling, and more.

After ruminating on the bigger picture in her memoir And I Shall Have Some Peace There, Margaret Roach has returned to the garden, insisting as ever that we must garden with both our head and heart, or as she expresses it, with "horticultural how-to and woo-woo." In The Backyard Parables, Roach uses her fundamental understanding of the natural world, philosophy, and life to explore the ways that gardening saved and instructed her, and meditates on the science and spirituality of nature, reminding her readers and herself to keep on digging.

About this title

About the Author

Margaret Roach is the author of the memoir And I Shall Have Some Peace There. She has been an editor at the New York Times, fashion editor and garden editor at Newsday, the first garden editor for Martha Stewart Living magazine, and the editorial director of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia.

Margaret is now a consultant and avid gardener, keeping fans up to date on her website A Way to Garden, which Anne Raver of the New York Times called "the best garden blog" she'd seen. Margaret is also the author of A Way to Garden, named Best Garden Book of the Year by the Garden Writers' Association of America.

Reviews

As orioles flit, tadpoles leap, and Jack the Demon Cat stalks unsuspecting chipmunks, Roach muses on the nature of nature in a garden she has tended for 25 years. Roach would be the first to admit the garden has, in many ways, tended her, too, and she brings a Zen-like appreciation for the lessons gardens impart to those who are willing to watch, listen, and learn. Informed by the seasons, Roach also gardens with a spiritual respect for earth’s basic elements. Water, in its frozen form, blankets trees in winter, while the land itself bursts forth in reassuring fecundity with spring’s arrival. Summer blazes with fiery heat and color only to have it all drift away on autumn’s chill winds. A pensive gardener, Roach is also passionate in her critique of trends and practices she views as harmful or unproductive, from the politics of seed selling to the pollution of streams. Now aging, along with her beloved garden, Roach, with grace and humor, assesses and accepts the inevitable changes that beset them both. --Carol Haggas

Edition details

• Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1455501980
• ISBN 13: 9781455501984
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288