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The Backyard Parables

Lessons on Gardening, and Life

The Backyard Parables Open the full-size image

Contributors

By Margaret Roach

Formats and Prices

Price

$37.00

Price

$47.00 CAD

Format

Format:

  1. Hardcover $37.00 $47.00 CAD
  2. ebook $13.99 $17.99 CAD

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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.

Genre:

  • "As a passionate, hopeful and often self-delusional gardener (the only kind of gardener there is!), I loved this book. Margaret Roach writes with intelligence, compassion, and-most of all-sanity. Her work is a blessing."
    Elizabeth Gilbert, bestselling author of Eat, Pray, Love
  • "As I read this witty, revealing, sometimes poetic confessional I felt I understood for the first time what a garden could be-a work of art, a source of pleasure and solace, an object of beauty, a provider of nourishment. And why Margaret calls the plot she tends 'my monster.' This is the story of a real relationship: Margaret and her garden, a love story."
    Anna Thomas, author of The Vegetarian Epicure and Love Soup
  • "In matters of both earth and heart, Margaret Roach is fearless. She digs deep. What she finds, and what she offers in this lyrical memoir of a gardening year, is hard-won wisdom laced with humor, hands-on how-to delivered with a poet's touch, experience embraced with fervor, humility, and grace."
    Katrina Kenison, author of Magical Journey and The Gift of an Ordinary Day
  • "On her knees in the garden, Margaret cultivates an intimate relationship with the Beloved, finding what the body, heart and soul may most desire. As Rumi says: "Why should we not play like that sometimes, having fun, exploring some nooks...in our own backyard."
    Daniel Ladinsky, bestselling Penguin poet-translator of Hafiz and Rumi

On Sale
Jan 15, 2013
Page Count
288 pages
Publisher
Grand Central Publishing
ISBN-13
9781455501984

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Margaret Roach

About the Author

Margaret Roach, one of America’s best-known garden writers, creates awaytogarden.com and the public radio show by the same name, which has been called a “top-5 garden podcast” by The Guardian and is the winner of multiple Garden Writers of America medals. She was the first garden editor of Martha Stewart Living magazine where she also co-hosted a weekly call-in radio show for several years. She lives in rural New York State, and her garden has been open for Garden Conservancy Open Days for more than 20 years.

Learn more about this author