Product Description
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.
Paperback, brand new, published by gardeningwell.ie.
About the author -
Ciarán De Buitléar is the husband of Fiona and dad to Sam and Zack. Born and raised in Dublin, he has made his home in Stamullen, Co. Meath for many years. By day he works as a database specialist in the tech world. In his spare time he has spent decades cultivating gardens that are as much about nature as they are about beauty.
He founded GardeningWell, an initiative for wildlife gardening and climate action. A trustee of FreeTrees Ireland, he has helped distribute thousands of native trees across the country.
Nature’s Acre is his first book. It shows how ordinary gardening can sit within Ireland’s tradition of writing about nature—while staying accessible to anyone, anywhere. His writing blends practical, sustainable gardening with expressive storytelling and a wry sense of humour.
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