A wonderful, life-enhancing book which follows a year in the life of a professional gardener and the relationship he has with the woman who employs him to look after her 12-acre garden.

*SHORTLISTED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE 2021*

‘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

Beautifully illustrated, Seed to Dust is a reflective and restorative account of a life lived in harmony with nature.

Marc Hamer has nurtured the same twelve acres of garden for decades. It’s rarely visited so he is the only person who fully knows its secrets. But it’s not his garden, and his relationship with its owner is at once distant and curiously intimate.

In Seed to Dust, Marc takes us month-by-month through his experiences both working in the garden and outside it. We encounter new plants and wildlife, gardening folklore and the joys of manual work; we learn, too, about Marc’s path from homelessness to family contentment, and the cycles of change that run through both the garden’s life and our own.

‘An absorbing combination of memoir, gardening folklore and natural history’ Country Life

‘Life-affirming… Absorbing’ Sue Stuart-Smith, Sunday Times bestselling author of The Well-Gardened Mind