Author Ciarán De Buitléar on the story behind his new book - Nature'a Acre : An Irish Garden Memoir of Making a Place where Life Grows

I’m delighted that Nature’s Acre has found one of its first bricks‑and‑mortar Irish home with TheBookshop.ie, and I’m grateful to them for giving me this space to introduce the book in my own words.

Nature’s Acre grew out of a single acre of Irish ground — a place that shaped me, challenged me, and ultimately taught me how to live with the land rather than on top of it. It’s a memoir about nettles and neighbours, childhood and climate, grief and growth. It’s about the wildlife that arrives when you stop trying to control everything, and the unexpected ways a garden can become a refuge, a teacher, and a mirror.

For years I’ve shared that journey through GardeningWell, helping schools, communities, and households across Ireland create wildlife‑friendly spaces of their own. But this book is the heart of it — the story behind the work, the place where it all began.

That’s why it means so much to me that the first physical bookshop to stock Nature’s Acre is an independent Irish one. Independent bookshops have always been the lifeblood of Irish reading culture. They champion local voices, take risks on new writers, and keep real discovery alive — the kind that happens through conversation, curiosity, and the simple act of picking up a book because someone behind the counter said, “You might like this.”

In a world where so much reading is mediated by screens and algorithms, independent bookshops remain one of the last places where stories are shared hand‑to‑hand, person‑to‑person. That’s exactly how Nature’s Acre was written — slowly, honestly, and rooted in real experience — so it feels right that it begins its journey here.

If you’d like to explore more about the book, the background stories, or the wider wildlife‑gardening work, you’ll find everything at:

gardeningwell.ie/natures-acre

Thank you for supporting independent Irish bookshops — and for supporting the kind of stories that grow from the ground up.

( And thanks to Ciarán for this input and for selling his book with us - Tomás)