Seed to Dust

A mindful, seasonal tale of a year in the garden

Marc Hamer, Jonathan Ashworth

$24.99

Paperback

Not in-store but you can order this
How long will it take?

Availability Information

We source books from suppliers in Australia and overseas. For books we don't currently have in stock, the time it takes to get them from our suppliers can vary widely - from a few days to a few months - so we check each book with each supplier to determine the expected time it will take to be supplied to us.

We then advise you accordingly. If the time taken to get any book is too long for you, you can let us know and we will cancel or adjust your order, and refund as required.

To find out the anticipated arrival time for specific items prior to ordering, please contact us by phone or email:

Phone +61 2 9264 3111, or 1800 4 BOOKS (1800 4 26657) if outside Sydney:
option 1 Abbey's Bookshop (Crime, History, Science, Kids & more) • info@abbeys.com.au
option 2 Language Book Centre (ESL & Foreign Languages) • language@abbeys.com.au
option 3 Galaxy Bookshop (Sci-fi, Fantasy, Romance, Graphic Novels) • sf@galaxybooks.com.au

QTY:

English

Vintage
06 April 2022

Memoirs; Gardening; The countryside, country life

A wonderful, life-enhancing book which follows a year in the life of a professional gardener and the relationship he has with the woman who employs him to look after her 12-acre garden.
*SHORTLISTED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE 2021
*

'A wholly original, semi-autobiographical book on how to live, how to be calm and content with only a little, in a quietly humming garden' Daily Mail

Beautifully illustrated, Seed to Dust is a reflective and restorative account of a life lived in harmony with nature.

Marc Hamer has nurtured the same twelve acres of garden for decades. It's rarely visited so he is the only person who fully knows its secrets. But it's not his garden, and his relationship with its owner is at once distant and curiously intimate.

In Seed to Dust, Marc takes us month-by-month through his experiences both working in the garden and outside it. We encounter new plants and wildlife, gardening folklore and the joys of manual work; we learn, too, about Marc's path from homelessness to family contentment, and the cycles of change that run through both the garden's life and our own.

'An absorbing combination of memoir, gardening folklore and natural history' Country Life

'Life-affirming... Absorbing' Sue Stuart-Smith, Sunday Times bestselling author of The Well-Gardened Mind

By: Marc Hamer
Illustrated by: Jonathan Ashworth
Imprint: Vintage
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 199mm, Width: 130mm, Spine: 30mm
Weight: 360g
ISBN: 9781529112498
ISBN 10: 1529112494
Pages: 416
Publication Date: 06 April 2022
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Marc Hamer was born in the North of England and moved to Wales over thirty years ago. After spending a period homeless, then working on the railway, he returned to education and studied fine art in Manchester and Stoke-on-Trent. He has worked in art galleries, marketing, graphic design and taught creative writing in a prison before becoming a gardener. Both his books, A Life in Nature; or How to Catch a Mole and Seed to Dust have been longlisted for the Wainwright Prize.

Reviews for Seed to Dust: A mindful, seasonal tale of a year in the garden

Written as a monthly journal, this is more memoir and philosophical meditation than gardener's manual... Hamer uses the material all around - robins and crows, beeches and cherry trees, jasmine, daffodils and soil - as the springboard for reflections on how to live a small-scale, spiritually aware life. ...making the case for seeing our place within nature, and relishing our contact with it. * Herald * Marc Hamer's gardening memoir offers an insight into what it is like to tend somebody else's plot, and how an unusual relationship blossomed...Seed to Dust is a bodily book. Hamer lets us in; we learn what his tools feel like in hands hardened by decades of manual labour...But it is also an unlikely love story: Hamer is happily married to Peggy, who we hear about, too, but his affection for Miss Cashmere, his elderly employer, is clear - and infectious. * Telegraph * Through his words, we connect with the ultimate text, the landscape itself. Seed to Dust is an invitation to read this world as Mr. Hamer does - with a close eye to what changes, and what does not. * Washington Post * [A] life-enhancing book * Eastern Daily Press *