There’s a lot of gardening advice out there. But none that invites you to think about how to be while you’re in your garden. With increasingly busy lives, yet another list of chores seems like the last thing we need when it comes to our own practice of self-care and relaxation. After all, aren’t these the things we wanted to escape to the garden for in the first place? What if there was a more low-intervention way to garden, some reciprocal arrangement through which both you and your soil get fed – with minimum fuss, effort and guilt on your part, and the maximum measure of healthy, organic growth for your garden?

In To Stand and Stare, Andrew Timothy O’Brien weaves together strands of botany, philosophy and mindfulness to form an ecological narrative suffused with practical gardening know-how. Informed by a deep understanding and appreciation of natural processes, O’Brien encourages the reader to think from the ground up, as we follow the pattern of a plant’s growth through the season – roots, shoots, and fruits – while advocating an increased awareness of our surroundings.