Margot Anne Kelley, author of A Gardener at the End of the World
When:
Thursday, Apr 18, 2024 7:00p -
8:00p
Thursday, Apr 18, 2024 7:00p -
8:00p
Where:
Porter Square Books
25 White Street
Cambridge, MA 02140
Admission:
FREE
Hosted by:
Categories:
History, Lectures & Conferences, Nature
Event website:
https://www.portersquarebooks.com/event/margot-anne-kelley-author-gardener-end-world
Porter Square Books is delighted to welcome Margot Anne Kelley for her latest book A Gardener at the End of the World! This event will take place on Thursday, April 18 at 7pm at Porter Square Books (25 White St. Cambridge, MA 02140).
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ABOUT A GARDENER AT THE END OF THE WORLD
A gardener's pandemic journal that combines memoir with an exploration of the natural world both inside and outside the garden.
In March 2020, Margot Anne Kelley was watching seeds germinate in her greenhouse. At high risk from illness, the planning, planting, and tending to seedlings took on extra significance. She set out to make her pandemic garden thrive but also to better understand the very nature of seeds and viruses.
As seeds became seedlings, became plants, became food, Kelley looks back over the last few millennia as successions of pandemics altered human beings and global culture. Seeds and viruses serve as springboards for wide-ranging reflections, such as their shared need for someone to transport them, the centrality of movement to being alive, and the domestication of plants as an act of becoming co-dependent.
Pandemic viruses only occurred through humankind's settling down, taking up agriculture, and giving up a nomadic life. And yet it's the garden that now provides a refuge and a source of life, inspiration, and hope. A Gardener at the End of the World explores questions of what we can preserve--of history, genetic biodiversity, culture, language--and what we cannot. It is for any reader curious about the overlap of nature, science, and history.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Margot Anne Kelley is a writer and photographer whose work focuses on the natural world. Her new book, A Gardener at the End of the World, explores some of the complex relationships connecting people, seeds, and viruses, and traces strands of our collective co-evolution. Kelley has been growing vegetables and herbs for over twenty years; currently, she does so in Midcoast Maine, where long summer days and strategic plant choices help make up for the shortness of the season.
