Seed to Dust

Written as a monthly journal, this is more memoir and philosophical meditation than gardener's manual... Hamer uses the material all around - robins and crows, beeches and cherry trees, jasmine, daffodils and soil - as the springboard for reflections on how to live a small-scale, spiritually aware life. ...making the case for seeing our place within nature, and relishing our contact with it.

Herald

Hamer takes the reader through his gardening year... Marc Hamer's gardening memoir offers an insight into what it is like to tend somebody else's plot, and how an unusual relationship blossomed...Seed to Dust is a bodily book. Hamer lets us in; we learn what his tools feel like in hands hardened by decades of manual labour...But it is also an unlikely love story: Hamer is happily married to Peggy, who we hear about, too, but his affection for Miss Cashmere, his elderly employer, is clear - and infectious.

Telegraph

[A] life-enhancing book

Eastern Daily Press

Inspirational... An invaluably original view of one man in his garden...noticing the tiny things that the busy world ignores... A wholly original book on how to live, how to be calm and content with only a little, in a quietly humming garden

Daily Mail

Seed to Dust draws on Hamer's deep sense of connection with plants and the earth as well as a lifetime of experience. Beautifully observed and quietly reflective, this is an absorbing and life-affirming read

Sue Stuart-Smith, Sunday Times bestselling author of The Well-Gardened Mind

Chapters...shimmer like lantern slides, lit with luminous imagery... Seed to Dust is an invitation to read this world as Mr. Hamer does - with a close eye to what changes, and what does not

Wall Street Journal

[An] absorbing combination of memoir, gardening folklore and natural history... This book provides insight into both the secrets of a garden and the experiences of the person caring for it

Country Life

An escape from the chaos of the world...I especially love seeing the unusual friendship between Marc and Miss Cashmere unfolding. He brings the reader right alongside him as he works, so we can really feel the sting of the rose thorns and the energy of a garden awakening and blooming

Lulah Ellender

I'm so grateful that this kindred spirit set aside his tools awhile and came indoors to write. No facet of nature, however subtle, eludes Marc Hamer - and I relish being invited along on each intimate adventure.

Margaret Roach, author of A Way to Garden

Seed to Dust draws on Hamer's deep sense of connection with plants and the earth as well as a lifetime of experience. Beautifully observed and quietly reflective, this is an absorbing and life-affirming read.

Sue Stuart-Smith, author of The Well-Gardened Mind

An intensely lyrical account of a single year... We start in the deep mid-winter, when everything is still frozen, and move through the seasons with Hamer as he tends the hydrangeas, plants the dahlias and prunes the old apple trees. He watches the wildlife too - the jackdaws pecking at the frozen ground, the peppered moth perfectly disguised against the tree bark...He also sketches in his earlier life, as a runaway Northern boy, a tramp (his word) and manual labourer. Quickly the book progresses from an observational gardening journal to a manual for living

Mail on Sunday

From a hardscrabble childhood and vagrancy to the life-enhancing rewards of nurturing both 12 acres and an unusual friendship...an almanac of meditations or parables or thoughts-for-the-day, got from dandelions and roses, lawnmowers and secateurs, dead-heading and mulching...Most Hamer meditations take similar forms, starting down to earth, if not actually in it, and ending taking off for the skies one way or another. His prose mimics this, beginning earthy and becoming airy.

Tim Dee, Guardian

A wholly original, semi-autobiographical book on how to live, how to be calm and content with only a little, in a quietly humming garden

Daily Mail