About this item
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 the Author
"I garden because I cannot help myself," says Margaret Roach. After 15 years at Martha Stewart Living and a decade at Newsday and The New York Times, she creates the award-winning blog and companion radio show/podcast A Way to Garden. In 2018 Margaret was awarded the highest medal for lifetime service from the nation's oldest horticultural society. An all-new version of her first award-winning book, "A Way to Garden," will be published in spring 2019, on its 21st anniversary. "Eat Pray Love" author Elizabeth Gilbert said: "Margaret Roach writes with intelligence, compassion, and most of all--sanity. Her work is a blessing."Gardeners' laments heard each fall like "the season's almost over" don't sit well with Margaret, who has worked to make her Hudson Valley-Berkshires place a 365-day visual treat. It has been open for Garden Conservancy Open Days for 20-plus years. Margaret wrote the 2011 corporate-dropout memoir, "And I Shall Have Some Peace There," about walking away from "success" for a quieter life closer to nature, and "The Backyard Parables" (2013) , blending garden memoir and how-to. (Erica Berger photo.)
