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Accomplished novelist, satirist, and garden writer Des Kennedy describes his life journey from a childhood of strict Irish Catholicism in England to a charmed existence amid the gardens of his Gulf Island home in British Columbia. From his First Holy Communion to his days as a young seminarian, through the Beat poetry scene in New York and the social upheavals of the 1960s, this monk-turned-pilgrim pursues a quest for meaning and purpose. After leaving monastic life and moving west, Kennedy takes up a new vocation in what has been called the Church of the Earth. On a rural acreage, he and his partner build their home from recycled and hand-hewn materials and create gardens that provide food as well as a symbiosis with the Earth that is as profoundly spiritual as past religious rituals. Spiced with irreverence and an eye for the absurd, The Way of a Gardener ranges over environmental activism, aboriginal rights, writing for a living, amateur wood butchery, the protocols of small community living, and the devilish obscenity of a billy goat at stud.

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Writer, environmentalist and gardener Des Kennedy has gathered together his best, most outrageous and most contemplative articles and essays of the past decade into a book full of playful wit and insight.Kennedy recounts one newspaper’s April Fool’s Day prank that had men across the UK buying heather in order to propagate a poor-man’s Viagra, expands on his trials creating a sod sloped roof, admits he once wanted to write a stump-puller’s guide to the universe and contemplates the dark beauty—and rat feces smell—of a voodoo lily. The articles are tied together with Kennedy’s assertion that gardening is a revolutionary act of maintaining harmony with nature that intertwines the human spirit with the natural world.A book that will appeal to any who admire earth’s raw beauty, Heart and Soil is a collection from a respected Canadian who has dedicated his life to protecting and respecting the environment, cultivating his passion with a healthy sprinkling of humour.

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