Nature's Acre: An Irish Garden Memoir of Making a Place Where Life Grows

It’s spring 2020 in a small Irish town. Ciarán is in the greenhouse with a book when the phone rings. What follows will change his life, his family, and the little patch of ground he thought he understood.

This isn’t a gardening manual. It’s the story of a small suburban garden that becomes a refuge, for wildlife, for neighbours, and for a mind that has never quite managed to feel at home in the world.

As lockdown closes in, Ciarán throws himself into the work of tending one acre: leaving corners wild, growing food without chemicals, building habitats instead of tidy borders. Along the way, he starts to unpick years of exhaustion, anxiety and not fitting in, and to ask what it means to live well on a damaged planet.

• Caring changes us.
• We find meaning in doing.
• Collaboration gives us place.

Nature’s Acre is part wildlife-garden diary, part community story, part account of holding a nervous system together with soil under the fingernails. It’s for anyone who has ever felt overwhelmed by the world, and wondered if there might be another way to live in it.