Six Square Metres
reflections from a small garden
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Life lessons from the ground up.
Sometimes you reap what you sow. Sometimes you reap what other people sowed. Sometimes you haven't got a clue what you are sowing, and sometimes you just get lucky, or unlucky. All these things are true of life, as of gardening.
In this thoughtful and beautifully observed book, journalist and gardening enthusiast Margaret Simons takes readers on a journey through the seasons, through her life, and through the tiny patch of inner-urban earth that is home to her garden.
Over the course of a year, within the garden and without, there are births to celebrate and deaths to mourn; there are periods of great happiness and light, and times of quiet reflection. There is, in other words, all the chaos, joy, sorrow, and splendour of being alive.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Australian journalist Simons (Resurrection in a Bucket) delivers a small but charming collection of her gardening columns. Some of her Aussie terminology is obscure ("chooks" are chickens; "quolls" are a kind of marsupial), but never her perspective on gardening. "Sometimes you reap what you sow. Sometimes you reap what other people sowed. Sometimes you haven't got a clue... and you just get lucky," she observes, then adds a fillip: "All these things are true of life, as of gardening." Therein lies her charm: she may start by writing about her six square meters, but then she's digressing about the links between gardening and life in general: about doing her taxes while boiling beef bones "taking stock and making stock" or what her two main reporting beats, politics and gardening, have in common "muckraking." Despite claiming her book is not a how-to, she offers practical tips generally translatable from one hemisphere to another (though American readers will have to keep in mind her seasons occur at different times of year, or they will be confused by a sentence placing April in late autumn). In the tradition of Germaine Greer, Vita Sackville-West, and Katharine S. White, Simons proves herself a modern doyenne of wry garden writing.
