A Gardener at the End of the World

“A Gardener at the End of the World serves as both a reflection on the shared experiences of the pandemic and a celebration of the ways in which the human spirit can find solace and growth in nature's embrace.” —Booklist “A book of quiet revelations and the strength that comes from endurance...Kelley finds small moments of the miraculous and transcendent.” —Maine Sunday Telegram “Detailed, engaging, and well-researched . . . A well-written chronicle of a gardening year, a pandemic, and their intertwined histories. Will appeal to a broad range of readers.” —Library Journal “Kelley transforms musings about a gardening hobby into a rich—and richly instructive—historical journey through human history. An eloquent and thought-provoking narrative.” —Kirkus “This book is a growing thing, concerned with the sounds a house makes as it wakes from winter dormancy, with ‘the music of moisture softening a seed coat, of germ expanding, growing so plump the coat eventually cracks.’ In A Gardener at the End of the World, Margot Anne Kelley grows onions and potatoes, melons and herbs, daffodils and word histories and the stories of life during a plague year. Like Janisse Ray’s The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food, this book is a journey through space and time to discover how humans and plants have shaped each other. I’ll never look at a loaf of bread the same way after reading Kelley’s lovely ode to Red Fife wheat. Kitchen gardens are stocked with histories, and Kelley reminds us to share and savor those stories lest they vanish.” —Joni Tevis, author of The World Is On Fire “More than merely a gardener’s journal of the plague year, Margot Anne Kelley’s meditations on plant histories and plagues, written in the face of the 2020 pandemic, make the intertwined histories of human endeavor and of our basic food staples seem at once precarious, miraculous, and ultimately beautiful. In Kelley’s hands, the carrot, the tomato, the apple all become luminous records of human trade, reminding us that our desires and our diseases—our beauty and the banes we seek to abolish—are inextricably entwined. This is a rich book—one to savor.” —Tess Taylor, author of Work & Days and editor of Leaning Toward Light: Poems for Gardens and the Hands that Tend Them