In her new book, “A Gardener at the End of the World,” Margot Anne Kelley brings the reader into her world for a full year at the beginning of the 2020 pandemic.
She begins by telling us: “We linger in the long now, the moment stretching tauter, thinner, as promises it will end extend, again and again, beyond grim horizon. Only the seasons adhere to the old order; I measure time by the tamarack.”
Kelley lives in Port Clyde. She is a writer and photographer focused on the natural world as her subject. Her previous book, “Foodtopia,” was a finalist for the Maine Literary Award in non-fiction. Kelley has also served as the editor of The Maine Review.
In March 2020, the COVID pandemic arrives and life begins a rapid slide into the surreal. For Kelly, she immerses herself inside her garden while learning all she can about what is happening “outside.” She shares what she has learned — historical markers in time when viruses reshaped the world — and she talks to and about plants and viruses while buffeted by the many emotions, thoughts and feelings affecting everyone while focused on tending tomato seedlings in her greenhouse and much more.
“A hundred and forty million years of evolution have given seeds the tools to wait out uncertain conditions and to recognize when the world is welcoming. I’m taking my cues from them now.”
The month of June arrives and with it an appreciation “that we live amid an ever-changing landscape.” Kelley is capturing the visual splendor of color within her garden and that of her neighbors. Distance is now real and the pandemic churns leaving loss amidst confusion.
“Being surrounded by such lush beauty feels almost unseemly given the bleakness of the wider world. The pandemic hasn’t abated at all; as of yesterday, there were over 6.7 million cases and nearly four hundred thousand deaths. And the protests in the wake of George Floyd’s killing are growing.”
September brings a push to implement what Kelley’s town had been working on all summer, to get back some “before” semblance of life. That meant getting kids back to school. For Kelley, her thoughts meander from her tamarack tree at the edge of her garden to Dr. Anthony Fauci, food pantries, plum trees, Christopher Columbus, COVID-19 cases, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and, finally, that her tomatoes are beginning to ripen.
“Putting up food from the garden is a pleasure tinged, for me, with irony. For most of my life, first as a student and then as a professor, my year was shaped by the academic calendar. It began not in January but September. When I began growing food, I thought doing so would reconnect me to the annual calendar and to seasonality. And it has. But like buying seeds in the middle of winter, putting up food takes me out of obvious synch with the season. Instead of spending beautiful early autumn days outdoors, I’m inside preparing for winter.”
December arrives and with it brings hope and poetry. As everything once colorful and aglow goes monochrome within her yard and landscape, Kelley tries to remain positive with the diminishing sunlight. The only crops remaining in her garden are the carrots she planted. And because of their varied types, a rainbow of color awaits as the garden rolls into a winter’s sleep.
“With the garden done for the year, I’ve been leaning hard on poetry for sustenance. In last week’s New Yorker, Brenda Hillman had a gorgeous short poem called ‘Winter Song for One Who Suffers.’ It feels so apt at this moment that I copied out a few lines and taped them on a wall so I can read them when I need to: ‘A soul can crouch / a long time while the heart / expands to reach its edges.’
Yes, it can.”
There have been many books written during and about the pandemic of 2020 from fiction to short stories, science-based and historical commentaries and emotional-laden treatises of what people felt, endured and lost during that frightful time. Kelley’s book is her reflection back, using her words and others with intelligence, respect and a poetic embrace to tell her story, one that kept me engaged from the very first page.
“A Gardener at the End of the World” is both a journal and memoir of a time made brutally real by the shrinking perimeter of life Kelley experienced. It is a necessary and essential read if one wants to understand the cruel hardships that accompany the beauty held within this “plant” called life, and that like every seed — if tended properly — will grow and eventually return, giving back that which it had been given.
A Gardener at the End of the World
Margot Anne Kelley
David R. Godine Publishers, 2024 Hardcover $28.95
