Nonfiction
A Gardener at the End of the World
(David R. Godine, 2024)
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.
(David R. Godine, 2024)
Ever wonder if there’s a better way to live, work, and eat? You’re not alone. Here is the story of five back-to-the-land movements, from 1840 to present day, when large numbers of utopian-minded people in the United States took action to establish small-scale farming as an alternative to mainstream agriculture. Then and now, it’s the story of people striving to live freely and fight injustice, to make the food on their table a little healthier, and to leave the planet less scarred than they found it.
Throughout America’s history as an industrial nation, sizable countercultural movements have chosen to forgo modern comforts in pursuit of a simpler life. In this illuminating alternative American history, Margot Anne Kelley details the evolution of food-centric utopian movements that were fueled by deep yearnings for unpolluted water and air, racial and gender equality, for peace, for a less consumerist lifestyle, for a sense of authenticity, for simplicity, for a healthy diet, and for a sustaining connection to the natural world.
Millennials who jettisoned cities for rural life form the core of America’s current back-to-the-land movement. These young farmers helped meet surges in supplies for food when COVID-19 ravaged lives and economies, and laid bare limitations in America’s industrial food supply chain. Their forebears were the utopians of the 1840s, including Thoreau and his fellow Transcendental friends who created Brook Farm and Fruitlands; the single taxers and “little landers” who created self-sufficient communities at the turn of the last century; Scott and Helen Nearing and others who decamped to the countryside during the Great Depression; and, of course, the hippie back-to-the-landers of the 1970s.
Today, food has become an important element of the social justice movement. Food is no longer just about what we eat, but about how our food is raised and who profits along the way. Kelley looks closely at the efforts of young farmers now growing heirloom pigs, culturally appropriate foods, and newly bred vegetables, along with others working in coalitions, advocacy groups, and educational programs to extend the reach of this era’s Good Food Movement.
Foodtopia: Communities in Pursuit of Peace, Love, & Homegrown Food
(Radius Books, 2015)
Emily Dickinson wrote that all it takes to make a prairie is “one clover, and a bee. / And revery.” It turns out that to know a prairie (or meadow) is a bit more complicated, as photographer Barbara Bosworth and writer Margot Anne Kelley have discovered. For more than a decade, Bosworth and Kelley have meandered in, studied and photographed a single meadow in Carlisle, Massachusetts. In addition to their own investigations, they have invited botanists, entomologists, naturalists and historians to consider the meadow with them. Also included are historic maps of the property dating to the 1800s, and a transcription of notes from a former owner whose family has continuously documented plant and bird life in the meadow from 1931 until the 1960s.
Part photo-essay, part journal and part scientific study, this book is a meditation on the shifting perspective that occurs when one repeatedly sees the same place through new eyes.
The Meadow
A Field Guide to Other People’s Trees
(George F. Thompson Publishing, 2014)
Old houses may not be haunted, but they retain many palpable vestiges of their pasts. And when Margot Anne Kelley and her husband, Rob, moved into an old farmhouse, they inherited that past as well as the property. On their one acre on Maine's mid-coast, they learned much about the history of their home not by visiting the local historical society but by spending time observing the trees, plants, and grasses that had been planted by those who once owned their land. What they discovered is a landscape history that harkens deep into New England's past.
In this field guide to other people's trees, we learn about some of those past owners and their trees. Guided by Kelley's evocative text and gorgeous photographs, we come to appreciate the same lessons that she did—that plants carry the past into the present, that we are part of a rich and interconnected world. In sharing her property with us, Kelley gives us a glimpse of her unique part of New England, encouraging us by her own example to imagine the many gifts we, too, inherit with a house and plot of land.
Intimate and informative, Kelley's field guide is a joy to read and a gift to all who share her love of nature and of place. Like the plants that define her land in Maine, this book invites readers to recognize that we can be fully grounded in our home place.
Local Treasures: Geocaching across America
(Center for American Places/ University of Chicago Press, 2006)
In the spring of 2000, a man in Oregon hid a box of toys in the woods, posted the geographic coordinates of its location on a Web site, and issued a challenge for others to find it. People used their GPS receivers to find his treasure, and a new game was born. Today over a million people worldwide participate in geocaching, hiding stashes of trinkets in a variety of locations—from a grove of trees to a cliff ledge to the depths of a riverbed—and then inviting others to find them, leave a note, and swap a treasure of their own. In Local Treasures, Margot Anne Kelley offers one of the first books on “geocaching,” exploring what compels ordinary people across the world to take part in these extraordinary treasure hunts.
Kelley traveled throughout the U.S. to chronicle the sites and stories of geocaching adventures, from the rocky coasts of Maine to the deserts surrounding Las Vegas to the starting point of the Mason-Dixon Line. Each striking, full-color photograph exposes a vision of America quite unlike that presented in a traditional guidebook: truly off the beaten path, these are non-idealized landscapes, often places with special meaning for the players alone. Kelley’s accompanying writings explore the world of geocaching communities, their rare ability to integrate new technologies with the natural world, and their complex and often ambivalent relationships to the surveillance technologies that sustain the game. In this era when people are increasingly disconnected from the land that surrounds them, geocaching offers an unusual and technologically savvy vision for the future. Kelley’s text is a fascinating examination of a new and creative diversion emerging from the intersection of the virtual world with the real.