Bookshelf    A Way to Garden: A Hands-On Primer for Every Season

A Way to Garden: A Hands-On Primer for Every Season

By Margaret Roach (Timber Press, 2019) Buy It Now

Hudson Valley master gardener Margaret Roach has a serious pedigree: former garden editor at Newsweek, editorial director at Martha Stewart Living, and host of an ongoing podcast and the NPR show “A Way to Garden.” For Roach, gardening is a moving meditation, spiritual practice, and life partner. “I’m all  about the horticultural how-to and ‘woo-woo,’” she avers. In this newly revised classic, she follows the life cycles of her beloved garden from conception and birth through youth, adulthood, senescence, death, and afterlife, updating her 1998 award-winner for the era of climate change, native plants, and sustainability. “By becoming a gardener, I accidentally—blessedly—landed myself in a fusion of science lab and Buddhist retreat,” she writes, “a place of nonstop learning and contemplation, where there is life buzzing to the maximum and also the deepest stillness.” Dig in.