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Leaves of Healing: A Year in the Garden
- GenresGardening
148 pages, Paperback
Published November 19, 2024
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42 people want to read
About the author
Matt Miller
1 bookMatt Miller is a native Nebraskan now living in Branson, Missouri, where he serves as Associate Professor of English at College of the Ozarks. He writes regularly for Front Porch Republic, Fare Forward, The New Territory, and other venues. His newsletter is A Habitation.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
July 20, 2025
This one I spent months with as a paperback. Truly one of those life-giving books that encapsulate and mark a moment in time.
Going so slow with it—while working on our own garden, attempting to get acquainted with the Book of Common Prayer, all while navigating our life’s particular realities—had me able to soak in these earthy images in tender ways. A rich invitation, this book. The leisurely walk through both the church and garden years felt gentle and fitting. We are creatures who need the stuff of earth to truly know the stuff of life and death, resurrection and the life of the Spirit (see also Hannah Anderson’s Humble Roots and Turning of Days). The thread of our relationship to time—both metronomic and liturgical, eternal—is a well of wisdom.
I’ll be returning to mine the quotes that struck deep and deserve mulling over.
And yes, somehow I’m in the acknowledgements. Very much a first. I’m just a lady who knows worthwhile writing when I see it.
As a Fare Forward review puts it, “The book conveys a truly sacramental outlook in a manner that a traditional theological treatise could not—because it embodies this outlook.”
Going so slow with it—while working on our own garden, attempting to get acquainted with the Book of Common Prayer, all while navigating our life’s particular realities—had me able to soak in these earthy images in tender ways. A rich invitation, this book. The leisurely walk through both the church and garden years felt gentle and fitting. We are creatures who need the stuff of earth to truly know the stuff of life and death, resurrection and the life of the Spirit (see also Hannah Anderson’s Humble Roots and Turning of Days). The thread of our relationship to time—both metronomic and liturgical, eternal—is a well of wisdom.
I’ll be returning to mine the quotes that struck deep and deserve mulling over.
And yes, somehow I’m in the acknowledgements. Very much a first. I’m just a lady who knows worthwhile writing when I see it.
As a Fare Forward review puts it, “The book conveys a truly sacramental outlook in a manner that a traditional theological treatise could not—because it embodies this outlook.”
September 30, 2025
Loved! Deep and thoughtful reflections on the garden, the church calendar, and time & place in general.
“We live in fear that we will not have enough, that the clock will run down before we can get what we most want. And so we take from one another and we thrust insults and we put animals and people behind bars and we waste topsoil and we start wars and we bomb cities and we refuse to imagine that we can do good to the world. We fail to accept that in God’s time, we have plenty of time, and in God’s economy, we will never want. And so we turn ourselves into something less than human, and our world into something less than the Peaceable Kingdom it was made to be.”
“We live in fear that we will not have enough, that the clock will run down before we can get what we most want. And so we take from one another and we thrust insults and we put animals and people behind bars and we waste topsoil and we start wars and we bomb cities and we refuse to imagine that we can do good to the world. We fail to accept that in God’s time, we have plenty of time, and in God’s economy, we will never want. And so we turn ourselves into something less than human, and our world into something less than the Peaceable Kingdom it was made to be.”
July 14, 2025
A wonderful wandering through the growing seasons and the church year. the quest is to bring the garden year into balance. Sinking into the rhythm of the liturgical year brings a rest and clarity that is an enjoyable read.
January 23, 2025
In a loud, crazy world, this book is a quiet, healing balm for the soul.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews