To Stand and Stare

By: Andrew Timothy O'Brien

Narrated by: Andrew Timothy O'Brien

Reconnect with nature from the ground up and nurture not only your garden but your soul.

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.


©2023 Andrew Timothy O'Brien © 2023 DK Audio

Preachy and condescending

This book is full of beautiful writing, and is read with enthusiasm by the author, who has a lovely speaking voice. His main point is to encourage readers to slow down and reflect while they garden, which gives rise to much armchair philosophy and literary description. The information is rudimentary, marking this as a book for beginner gardeners; but the title must be ignored, because this is not a how-to but a "how to be," with some of the preachiness this implies. It is an encomium and elegy to gardening and to nature, but the author's hand-wringing about global warming, his own effect on nature, and even, briefly, colonialism (!) ruins what could have been a deeper meditation. The elegiac writing fails because the author lacks the character to be able to approach true seriousness. In a subtle but conspicuous way, he wrings his hands, upset to disturb even a spider's web, and calls trampling insects "violence." This is a kind of guilt caused by what can only be called ignorance, itself caused by the lack of a sense of proportion and historical perspective. The result is a book neither useful nor inspiring to experienced gardeners. For beginners, it does not edify, and reinforces ignorance about nature and our place in it. If the author knows better, the book is cynical; but if he doesn't, he's a fool.