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In Kiltumper: A Year in an Irish Garden
From the authors of This Is Happiness and
Her Name Is Rose,
a memoir of life in rural Ireland and a meditation on the power, beauty, and importance of the natural world.
35 years ago, when they were in their twenties, Niall Williams and Christine Breen made the impulsive decision to leave their lives in New York City and move to Christine's ancestral home in the town of Kiltumper in rural Ireland. In the decades that followed, the pair dedicated themselves to writing, gardening, and living a life that followed the rhythms of the earth.
In 2019, with Christine in the final stages of recovery from cancer and the land itself threatened by the arrival of turbines just one farm over, Niall and Christine decided to document a year of living in their garden and in their small corner of a rapidly changing world. Proceeding month-by-month through the year, and with beautiful seasonal illustrations, this is the story of a garden in all its many splendors and a couple who have made their life observing its wonders.
35 years ago, when they were in their twenties, Niall Williams and Christine Breen made the impulsive decision to leave their lives in New York City and move to Christine's ancestral home in the town of Kiltumper in rural Ireland. In the decades that followed, the pair dedicated themselves to writing, gardening, and living a life that followed the rhythms of the earth.
In 2019, with Christine in the final stages of recovery from cancer and the land itself threatened by the arrival of turbines just one farm over, Niall and Christine decided to document a year of living in their garden and in their small corner of a rapidly changing world. Proceeding month-by-month through the year, and with beautiful seasonal illustrations, this is the story of a garden in all its many splendors and a couple who have made their life observing its wonders.
304 pages, Hardcover
First published August 17, 2021
124 people are currently reading
2599 people want to read
About the author
Niall Williams
37 books1,850 followersNiall Williams studied English and French Literature at University College Dublin and graduated with a MA in Modern American Literature. He moved to New York in 1980 where he married Christine Breen. His first job in New York was opening boxes of books in Fox and Sutherland's Bookshop in Mount Kisco. He later worked as a copywriter for Avon Books in New York City before leaving America with Chris in 1985 to attempt to make a life as a writer in Ireland. They moved on April 1st to the cottage in west Clare that Chris's grandfather had left eighty years before to find his life in America.
His first four books were co-written with Chris and tell of their life together in Co Clare.
In 1991 Niall's first play THE MURPHY INITIATIVE was staged at The Abbey Theatre in Dublin. His second play, A LITTLE LIKE PARADISE was produced on the Peacock stage of The Abbey Theatre in 1995. His third play, THE WAY YOU LOOK TONIGHT, was produced by Galway's Druid Theatre Company in 1999.
Niall's first novel was FOUR LETTERS OF LOVE. Published in 1997, it went on to become an international bestseller and has been published in over twenty countries. His second novel, AS IT IS IN HEAVEN was published in 1999 and short-listed for the Irish Times Literature Prize. Further novels include THE FALL OF LIGHT, ONLY SAY THE WORD, BOY IN THE WORLD and its sequel, BOY AND MAN.
In 2008 Bloomsbury published Niall's fictional account of the last year in the life of the apostle, JOHN.
His new novel, HISTORY OF THE RAIN, will be published by Bloomsbury in the UK/Ireland and in the USA Spring 2014. (Spanish and Turkish rights have also been sold.)
Niall has recently written several screenplays. Two have been optioned by film companies.
His first four books were co-written with Chris and tell of their life together in Co Clare.
In 1991 Niall's first play THE MURPHY INITIATIVE was staged at The Abbey Theatre in Dublin. His second play, A LITTLE LIKE PARADISE was produced on the Peacock stage of The Abbey Theatre in 1995. His third play, THE WAY YOU LOOK TONIGHT, was produced by Galway's Druid Theatre Company in 1999.
Niall's first novel was FOUR LETTERS OF LOVE. Published in 1997, it went on to become an international bestseller and has been published in over twenty countries. His second novel, AS IT IS IN HEAVEN was published in 1999 and short-listed for the Irish Times Literature Prize. Further novels include THE FALL OF LIGHT, ONLY SAY THE WORD, BOY IN THE WORLD and its sequel, BOY AND MAN.
In 2008 Bloomsbury published Niall's fictional account of the last year in the life of the apostle, JOHN.
His new novel, HISTORY OF THE RAIN, will be published by Bloomsbury in the UK/Ireland and in the USA Spring 2014. (Spanish and Turkish rights have also been sold.)
Niall has recently written several screenplays. Two have been optioned by film companies.
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November 20, 2022
A thousand years ago, back in the late 1980's, I was in my first Irish roots-finding phase and picked up a copy of "O Come Ye Back to Ireland: Our First Year in County Clare". It was the story of a couple moving to Ireland to live in the house of their ancestors. It was a charming and eye-opening look at an exquisite dream meeting up with the shock of reality.
Fast forward to this year. I saw the listing for "In Kiltumper - A Year in an Irish Garden" by the same couple, Niall Williams and Christine Breen, thirty-five years later. I was unaware that both had been writing this whole time, and now we find them at a crossroads. This struck me as similar to my experience with Facebook... finding friends I had not been in touch with for decades while the whole gulf of young adulthood had been flashing by.
The land Christine and Niall have been living in is being threatened. Giant wind turbines are being installed just about on top of them. Trees and ancient roadside stone walls have to be pulverized to accommodate the transport of these turbos. In a land rarely touched by any man-made noise pollution, the fans will be droning day and night. These so-called "wind farms" will hover as mechanical intrusions to a virgin landscape. Add in the very real climate damage done by global warming and you see the concern these two have about the future for a place where time had previously had little effect.
Please do not be put off if you fear something approximating a technical gardening manual--my gardening experience is limited to one dubious tomato plant in Boy Scouts. I had fully intended to scan over any details about flowers or vegetables, the way I sometimes (with a tinge of guilt) scan over poetry passages in a novel. I was pulled in, though-- how could I not be? A raging storm is about to make landfall and they are outside meticulously tying plants to bamboo supports. Niall says Chris "...is like a mother whose children are out there in a dark hazardous elsewhere." These people care so much about the struggle to maintain and improve the garden and land they dwell on while wondering if this paradise has any future at all.
"In Kiltumper" rates 5 stars for a year's rich experience working the Irish countryside. I also just re-ordered the original "O Come Ye Back to Ireland"-- time to revisit old friends.
I thank the authors, Bloomsbury Publishing, and NetGalley for the advance reader copy in exchange for an honest review. Sláinte!
#InKiltumper #NetGalley
Fast forward to this year. I saw the listing for "In Kiltumper - A Year in an Irish Garden" by the same couple, Niall Williams and Christine Breen, thirty-five years later. I was unaware that both had been writing this whole time, and now we find them at a crossroads. This struck me as similar to my experience with Facebook... finding friends I had not been in touch with for decades while the whole gulf of young adulthood had been flashing by.
The land Christine and Niall have been living in is being threatened. Giant wind turbines are being installed just about on top of them. Trees and ancient roadside stone walls have to be pulverized to accommodate the transport of these turbos. In a land rarely touched by any man-made noise pollution, the fans will be droning day and night. These so-called "wind farms" will hover as mechanical intrusions to a virgin landscape. Add in the very real climate damage done by global warming and you see the concern these two have about the future for a place where time had previously had little effect.
Please do not be put off if you fear something approximating a technical gardening manual--my gardening experience is limited to one dubious tomato plant in Boy Scouts. I had fully intended to scan over any details about flowers or vegetables, the way I sometimes (with a tinge of guilt) scan over poetry passages in a novel. I was pulled in, though-- how could I not be? A raging storm is about to make landfall and they are outside meticulously tying plants to bamboo supports. Niall says Chris "...is like a mother whose children are out there in a dark hazardous elsewhere." These people care so much about the struggle to maintain and improve the garden and land they dwell on while wondering if this paradise has any future at all.
"In Kiltumper" rates 5 stars for a year's rich experience working the Irish countryside. I also just re-ordered the original "O Come Ye Back to Ireland"-- time to revisit old friends.
I thank the authors, Bloomsbury Publishing, and NetGalley for the advance reader copy in exchange for an honest review. Sláinte!
#InKiltumper #NetGalley
May 22, 2021
Reading this book is a lovely and moving experience.
Rather than giant plots - there are two giant people: Niall Williams, and Christine Breen.
Rather than earth shattering suspenseful twists and turns, there is earth plowing, tilling, fertilizing, seeding, sowing, watering, and love-laboring in the garden.
Unpretentious- and magnificent .....Niall and Chris tell us intimately about their lives.
A couple that are extremely close....have a blessed marriage, home, a quiet lifestyle together - away from city noise. They write. They garden. They cherish the magnitude of this.
The way their gardening is described- literally and figuratively - month by month- describing gardening needs, expectations, changes, colors, scents, and growth - we experience how beautifully they dance together — through the seasons and years — each spring, summer, fall, and winter.
I deeply relate to Niall and Chris ....
I cherish my own wonderful plantsman husband of 42 years, our magnificent garden, (Paul takes the lead with our worms and tilling the soil, more than me), books, reading, (I take this lead), and our side-by-side living our quiet lives.
Our garden … and saline pools … are loves of our lives.
Niall and Chris’s book is especially a gift to garden lovers - and couples who cherish theirs like a child.
The prose is alluring
and exquisite.....
....Niall, Chris, marriage, gardening, writing, reading, are the important aspects - the intimate aspects of their lives are gracefully written.
Their prose kept me attached to this lovely couple and nature.
At times I stopped reading to absorb their combined beauty, lucidity, and passion.
I’ve been a fan of Niall Williams novels for years. I’m now a fan of his wife, Christine Breen, too.
It was an honor to read “In Kiltumper”.....
I take away ‘much more’ than a year experience living their Irish Garden.....
I take away overwhelming - amounts of love, faith, and appreciation.
A few excerpts:
“I am aware that some of my sense of urgency to write about Kiltumper this year stems from the decision of the planners to designate this a place suitable for wind exploitation. Besides all the other objections we have to this, besides knowing that no planner stood in our garden, or on the hill of Upper Tumper, in fact did know actual regarding before making this decision, there is simply a feeling of hurt on behalf of a place we love”.
“The garden at Kiltumper could not exist anywhere else. If, as we have sometimes thought in the past year, we may have to leave here when the turbines come in on us, if we can hear them turning in the garden, in the house when the window is open, we know we cannot bring the garden with us, nor could we replicate it anywhere else, which makes the thought of that loss all the more potent. Because in some real and essential way, the garden is our life here”.
“Today we go to Chris’s oncology appointment in Galway”
These have been a feature on the landscape of the past four years since she collapsed in London and had a large tumor removed from her bowel.
Fighting is the word they use for cancer, and time and time again, you realize how apt that is. Nor does the fight quite end, and there is a kind of ongoing spiritual and psychological impact in that.
Nonetheless, the cancer patients treatment is measured in oncology appointments, and the further you get from the surgery and the chemotherapy the further apart the appointments become, so you have a sense of moving away and gradually, if you are very lucky, and two new terrain. This is how it has seemed to me. Through all of it, intense and against extraordinary odds, Chris has battled —the adverb that has occurred to me is the old one — valiantly.
And whatever help I and our children have been and being by her side, near or far, the real support troops were certainly in the garden in
Kiltumper”.
“Evenings you could pause at the front door and see the whole of the garden in a standing stillness with scatters of color like brushstrokes, or dancers, birds darting against the late night, and everything held as in composition over thirty years in the making. And under the spell of that, you forget how frail and vulnerable the whole thing is”.
July in the garden was “too sensual to be comprehended”.
Niall was in the quiet rapture of his ‘sensual’ thought, when Chris walked into the conservatory where he was writing. She had that flushed face of summer work.
“The weeds are growing too fast”, she said.
Then Chris says to Niall,
“I hope you’re not just writing that it’s wonderful, are you?”
“But it is”.
“She smiles her extraordinary smile. You! she says. And we’re both near enough to laughing. Something of our whole life together is in this, my dreaming and her truthfulness. The necessary components of all gardens? (And a good marriage perhaps?) My mind will come back to this later, I know; in my notebook I jot down something, but midsummer is too busy now for anything other than notes on the fly. There will be plenty of dark and wet days ahead for rumination and philosophy”.
From spinach, to poppies, ( more than you can count), perennials to slugs, earth worms, and insects….
peonies, delphiniums, a purple baptisia, miniature daisies, purple irises, a tower of pink, purple, and purple-red sweet peas, geraniums, (there are so many they could have their own chapter), scabious, purple lupin, roses, Dahlias,
Bamboo canes and green twine….. etc. etc….
gardening is healing. Gardening is love.
Thank you Netgalley, Bloomsbury, Niall, and Chris.
Rather than giant plots - there are two giant people: Niall Williams, and Christine Breen.
Rather than earth shattering suspenseful twists and turns, there is earth plowing, tilling, fertilizing, seeding, sowing, watering, and love-laboring in the garden.
Unpretentious- and magnificent .....Niall and Chris tell us intimately about their lives.
A couple that are extremely close....have a blessed marriage, home, a quiet lifestyle together - away from city noise. They write. They garden. They cherish the magnitude of this.
The way their gardening is described- literally and figuratively - month by month- describing gardening needs, expectations, changes, colors, scents, and growth - we experience how beautifully they dance together — through the seasons and years — each spring, summer, fall, and winter.
I deeply relate to Niall and Chris ....
I cherish my own wonderful plantsman husband of 42 years, our magnificent garden, (Paul takes the lead with our worms and tilling the soil, more than me), books, reading, (I take this lead), and our side-by-side living our quiet lives.
Our garden … and saline pools … are loves of our lives.
Niall and Chris’s book is especially a gift to garden lovers - and couples who cherish theirs like a child.
The prose is alluring
and exquisite.....
....Niall, Chris, marriage, gardening, writing, reading, are the important aspects - the intimate aspects of their lives are gracefully written.
Their prose kept me attached to this lovely couple and nature.
At times I stopped reading to absorb their combined beauty, lucidity, and passion.
I’ve been a fan of Niall Williams novels for years. I’m now a fan of his wife, Christine Breen, too.
It was an honor to read “In Kiltumper”.....
I take away ‘much more’ than a year experience living their Irish Garden.....
I take away overwhelming - amounts of love, faith, and appreciation.
A few excerpts:
“I am aware that some of my sense of urgency to write about Kiltumper this year stems from the decision of the planners to designate this a place suitable for wind exploitation. Besides all the other objections we have to this, besides knowing that no planner stood in our garden, or on the hill of Upper Tumper, in fact did know actual regarding before making this decision, there is simply a feeling of hurt on behalf of a place we love”.
“The garden at Kiltumper could not exist anywhere else. If, as we have sometimes thought in the past year, we may have to leave here when the turbines come in on us, if we can hear them turning in the garden, in the house when the window is open, we know we cannot bring the garden with us, nor could we replicate it anywhere else, which makes the thought of that loss all the more potent. Because in some real and essential way, the garden is our life here”.
“Today we go to Chris’s oncology appointment in Galway”
These have been a feature on the landscape of the past four years since she collapsed in London and had a large tumor removed from her bowel.
Fighting is the word they use for cancer, and time and time again, you realize how apt that is. Nor does the fight quite end, and there is a kind of ongoing spiritual and psychological impact in that.
Nonetheless, the cancer patients treatment is measured in oncology appointments, and the further you get from the surgery and the chemotherapy the further apart the appointments become, so you have a sense of moving away and gradually, if you are very lucky, and two new terrain. This is how it has seemed to me. Through all of it, intense and against extraordinary odds, Chris has battled —the adverb that has occurred to me is the old one — valiantly.
And whatever help I and our children have been and being by her side, near or far, the real support troops were certainly in the garden in
Kiltumper”.
“Evenings you could pause at the front door and see the whole of the garden in a standing stillness with scatters of color like brushstrokes, or dancers, birds darting against the late night, and everything held as in composition over thirty years in the making. And under the spell of that, you forget how frail and vulnerable the whole thing is”.
July in the garden was “too sensual to be comprehended”.
Niall was in the quiet rapture of his ‘sensual’ thought, when Chris walked into the conservatory where he was writing. She had that flushed face of summer work.
“The weeds are growing too fast”, she said.
Then Chris says to Niall,
“I hope you’re not just writing that it’s wonderful, are you?”
“But it is”.
“She smiles her extraordinary smile. You! she says. And we’re both near enough to laughing. Something of our whole life together is in this, my dreaming and her truthfulness. The necessary components of all gardens? (And a good marriage perhaps?) My mind will come back to this later, I know; in my notebook I jot down something, but midsummer is too busy now for anything other than notes on the fly. There will be plenty of dark and wet days ahead for rumination and philosophy”.
From spinach, to poppies, ( more than you can count), perennials to slugs, earth worms, and insects….
peonies, delphiniums, a purple baptisia, miniature daisies, purple irises, a tower of pink, purple, and purple-red sweet peas, geraniums, (there are so many they could have their own chapter), scabious, purple lupin, roses, Dahlias,
Bamboo canes and green twine….. etc. etc….
gardening is healing. Gardening is love.
Thank you Netgalley, Bloomsbury, Niall, and Chris.
September 1, 2021
“A person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world.” - Wendell Berry
Written by Niall Williams and Christeen Breen who have shared their life in a lovely rural spot in County Clare for thirty-five years, this is the story of their love of the land, the garden, and a life that allows for space and time to breathe, appreciating their surroundings, as well as the bounty that gardening can bring.
’All gardens are asking for attention all the time, and the return for that attention is to gift you an essential now, the present moment, where you are face to face with the nature of things. Lest that sound too grand, or abstract, what I mean is the very opposite. There is nothing abstract about the heavy clay growing heavier in the blown rain of Kiltumper, and nothing too grand in “Niall, we need to de-caterpillar the kale now.”
'But there is a kind of happiness.’ - quote from NY Times 2019 interview with Niall Williams Is Anyone Happy Anymore?
This is the second of the memoirs written by this husband and wife team that I’ve read, the first being O Come Ye Back to Ireland, which I read some four years ago. Reading any of his books never fails to transport me back to Ireland, but even more so these books in which they share their lives there, living in the place where Christine’s grandfather was born, along with his grandfather, as well. When they moved there, it was somewhat on a whim, eager to live a life on their terms. I doubt they’ve regretted it overall. It is where their children were raised, where they wrote their books, with Chris painting or drawing at times, or in the garden at others, often with Niall, sometimes on her own. A spot on this earth that brings them both joy, It is a garden which feels like home to them, a different form of expressing themselves, and sharing beauty with others.
It is a relatively quiet life, living in rhythm with the seasons, the reverence they have for this place, this land and for this life they’ve been given, as well as the life they’ve managed to fashion for themselves. A life that hasn’t always been easy, but it has been filled with love. Love for each other, their family, the land they live on and for the generations that came before them, as well as those that will follow.
There’s that sense of wondering what will follow in the future - will their lives, all of our lives, change? Between global environmental challenges and having lived sixty-some years, thirty-five of which have been on this land, in this home - what changes are in the future, and which will be good changes vs. bad? Christine’s health has been a challenge for some time, and it is never far from their minds to begin with, but add to that environmental changes, and life challenges, they always are having to weigh the pros and cons. But then there is the garden, which like most gardens has been an evolution over these thirty-five years, always, always a work-in-progress. It is a part of them, their hearts, souls and bodies are what have tended it, and given the garden life. The garden, in turn, has fed their hearts and souls and bodies, as well, sharing it’s life with them.
The New York Times article ’Is Anyone Happy Anymore?’ ‘We’ve lost our ability to take comfort in small things.’ - Dec. 21, 2019
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/21/op...
Published: 31 Aug 2021
Many thanks for the ARC provided by Bloomsbury USA / Bloomsbury Publishing
July 21, 2025
“On the first stroke of midnight, following a tradition in Chris’s grandmother’s family, we clasp each other’s hands and run out the back door of the house, taking the old year with us. Good riddance to it. Let it off. In a chain, like children, we run. To the stars and the spirits, to ghosts past, present, and future, to the bare sycamores on the western wall, we shout wild joyous ‘Happy New Year!’as often and as loud as we can, rushing along the crisp-frosted gravel round the back, turning left and left again to come in through the open stone cabin into the front garden — Happy New Year to it and all who have their homes there — and then not delaying because we must get in before the last bells, we hurry to the front door to bring the new year in with us.”
And so begins In Kiltumper: A Year in an Irish Garden by Niall Williams and Christine Breen. It actually is the last book of their four preceding books documenting their brave exploration in to this rural community in the outer reaches of Shannon, Ireland. The Kiltumper Quartet were the following books: O Come Ye Back to Ireland, When Summer’s in the Meadow, The Pipes are Calling, and The Luck of the Irish.
This beautiful book, In Kiltumper, A Year in an Irish Garden follows the changing seasons in Kiltumper and in the lives of the authors. Niall Williams, born in Dublin, and his wife Christine Breen. This young couple decided in their twenties to leave their professional lives in New York City and move to Christine’s ancestral home in Kiltumper, a rural part of County Clare, Ireland, to pursue their writing. It was in this beautiful space that this couple dedicated themselves to writing, gardening, and living a life following the rhythms of the earth. And that is so beautifully portrayed as we literally walk with them for a year with the changing seasons, the changing light, and their progression through the year. This is a story of a garden with all its many splendors throughout the changing seasons. And it should be said that preceding each month, there is a splendid pen and ink drawing by Christine Breen, a delightful book.
January 18, 2022
Niall Williams and Christine Breen have gone to great lengths to describe their lives in Ireland. They are originally from the US and have been Irish residents for 37 years. Both are in their 60's and their loving marriage is highlighted as well as the obvious respect they have for each other.
The impetus for this sharing is the coming of wind turbines to the area. The landscape is going to change dramatically. At the very least, many of the old stone walls will be removed. Niall and Chris are both worried about the negative effects these will have on their lives.
We read much about the beautiful plants in their garden: trees, flowers and produce. Niall also shares some musings on memory, the lessons learned from gardening, and remoteness.
As a Catholic, I was especially touched by the outdoor mass celebrated by Father Tim. Niall was touched as well.
I was introduced to Wendell Berry, who writes "superbly and urgently about nature".
The descriptive writing of Williams is a treasure. I can picture myself being with the couple in the west of Ireland.
I see more Niall Williams (AND Wendell Berry) in my reading future.
5 stars
The impetus for this sharing is the coming of wind turbines to the area. The landscape is going to change dramatically. At the very least, many of the old stone walls will be removed. Niall and Chris are both worried about the negative effects these will have on their lives.
We read much about the beautiful plants in their garden: trees, flowers and produce. Niall also shares some musings on memory, the lessons learned from gardening, and remoteness.
As a Catholic, I was especially touched by the outdoor mass celebrated by Father Tim. Niall was touched as well.
I was introduced to Wendell Berry, who writes "superbly and urgently about nature".
The descriptive writing of Williams is a treasure. I can picture myself being with the couple in the west of Ireland.
I see more Niall Williams (AND Wendell Berry) in my reading future.
5 stars
March 14, 2023
This is a great book for anyone:
Who loves to garden
Who loves to read about gardening
For lovers of Niall Williams fiction
I fit the first two categories, and intend to explore his fiction very soon.
Who loves to garden
Who loves to read about gardening
For lovers of Niall Williams fiction
I fit the first two categories, and intend to explore his fiction very soon.
August 16, 2021
2.5 rounded up.
I have very mixed feelings about this book - some passages were just lovely, and some a bit cringy. The book is organised by month - starting with the New Year until December - with both Niall Williams and Christine Breen writing. Christine's paragraphs appear in italics, and the text otherwise is mostly Niall, which makes the collaboration seem uneven - and Christine's writing feels like footnotes rather than a contribution. It is a shame, especially given the fact I found Christine's writing more enjoyable - she delights in describing flowers, makes her experience very personal and heartfelt, where Niall mostly quotes other writers (Robert Macfarlane is a favourite, quoted every few pages.) Christine is described by Niall many times as an "instinctive gardener" while he portrays himself as the intellectual who likes nature but mostly writing and reading about it, with less practical knowledge. This was repeated so many times that he came across as a vain and pretentious man whose compliments towards his wife as his opposite - someone who feels the earth, and is definitely not an intellectual - passive-agressive. Reading Christine, she definitely seems as educated and knowledgeable as him, and her writing feels more genuine, as well as more pleasant - Niall has a habit of switching from the lyrical to the colloquial and starts every other sentence with "And," or "So," which I found distracting. He seems very aware of this and keeps writing things like "I'm not being clear enough here", resulting in the same ideas being expressed a couple of times because he cannot articulate them clearly.
Despite money being mentioned later in the book, when Niall complains that their revenue is unstable and hard to predict, they both seem somewhat tone-deaf: they moved from New York to Clare, where Christine's ancestors are from, bought the very house these ancestors once owned, "only following a prompting in [their] spirits that [they] wanted to live true to [their] own nature". They describe it as "a purely romantic impulse"with "no thought given to whether or not we had any talent, how we would actually make a living, nor what it would really mean to try and live from words and earth in a rural place on the edge of Europe". At that moment I was reminded of something Chelsea Fagan, (the financial blogger) said - "A lot of things that we think take a lot of courage actually just take a lot of money" (for example, "quitting your job with no backup" or "starting over in a new city") and it would have been nice to see them acknowledge that privileged position.
I also expected illness to be a larger part of the memoir; it does appear every now and then, as Christine has to do a checkup every six months and anxiously waits to know if she really is recovered from cancer; but it feels more like a side note than the essence of the book.
The essence of the book, really, is the wind turbines being installed 500 meters from their house. That's where the book really takes a turn for the worse as Niall and Christine both write extensively (Niall more than Christine, again) about their anger and complain at lengths about the wind turbines and the damage - trees being felled, roads having to be widened, the noise, the ruined landlscape. Anyone can sympathise with that, I doubt Greta Thunberg herself would enjoy living so close to three wind turbines. However Niall Williams writes so much about it that it becomes.... suspicious. Environmental concerns are only brought up in the last few chapters of the book, and while he recognises that green energy is important, he goes on and on about why wind turbines are not a good solution: they cost a lot of energy to make, they ruin the landscape, they are noisy. His solution? Have them all inside at sea, like what has been done in the US, so they are not visible and the noise cannot be heard. He fails to mention the fact that they will still take as much energy and create as much carbon to be made and transported to the sea - so really, the issue is just the proximity to his house, isn't it? It's fine - really, everyone understands that - but the bashing of "green energy" (he dislikes the term - it is not green as it creates a lot of carbon emission to be built and transported - which apparently defeats the point of having them installed) is too constant, too much. When he writes defensively that maybe he is just too old to understand, he seems aware of how he comes across: a boomer who never really thought about the environment and is devastated that the consequences of the crisis are reaching him.
When he describes seeing pheasants while on his walk to pick up some turf to burn in the fireplace, I had to laugh: peat is hardly a green energy, releases tons of carbon dioxide and their use accelerates climate change. When he casually mentions it after spending page after page complaining that wind turbines are not even "green", it's hard to believe this person actually reads about the environment or cares about it.
His rage about wind turbines being so near his house is, again, understandable. But I would have kept that rage for a sassy Tweet and not for 30 pages of my book on gardening.
I could go on but overall, this is a book that made me angry at times - the privilege that they never acknowledge, the hatred for the Green party ("the future will be much less green for going Green"), the poor writing many times - but there are also lovely passages. Christine's descriptions of what she grows are moving and genuine; Niall's recollections of his grandfather and his roses were enjoyable to read and very touching. But the whole book together felt clumsy and unfinished.
Free ARC received from Netgalley.
I have very mixed feelings about this book - some passages were just lovely, and some a bit cringy. The book is organised by month - starting with the New Year until December - with both Niall Williams and Christine Breen writing. Christine's paragraphs appear in italics, and the text otherwise is mostly Niall, which makes the collaboration seem uneven - and Christine's writing feels like footnotes rather than a contribution. It is a shame, especially given the fact I found Christine's writing more enjoyable - she delights in describing flowers, makes her experience very personal and heartfelt, where Niall mostly quotes other writers (Robert Macfarlane is a favourite, quoted every few pages.) Christine is described by Niall many times as an "instinctive gardener" while he portrays himself as the intellectual who likes nature but mostly writing and reading about it, with less practical knowledge. This was repeated so many times that he came across as a vain and pretentious man whose compliments towards his wife as his opposite - someone who feels the earth, and is definitely not an intellectual - passive-agressive. Reading Christine, she definitely seems as educated and knowledgeable as him, and her writing feels more genuine, as well as more pleasant - Niall has a habit of switching from the lyrical to the colloquial and starts every other sentence with "And," or "So," which I found distracting. He seems very aware of this and keeps writing things like "I'm not being clear enough here", resulting in the same ideas being expressed a couple of times because he cannot articulate them clearly.
Despite money being mentioned later in the book, when Niall complains that their revenue is unstable and hard to predict, they both seem somewhat tone-deaf: they moved from New York to Clare, where Christine's ancestors are from, bought the very house these ancestors once owned, "only following a prompting in [their] spirits that [they] wanted to live true to [their] own nature". They describe it as "a purely romantic impulse"with "no thought given to whether or not we had any talent, how we would actually make a living, nor what it would really mean to try and live from words and earth in a rural place on the edge of Europe". At that moment I was reminded of something Chelsea Fagan, (the financial blogger) said - "A lot of things that we think take a lot of courage actually just take a lot of money" (for example, "quitting your job with no backup" or "starting over in a new city") and it would have been nice to see them acknowledge that privileged position.
I also expected illness to be a larger part of the memoir; it does appear every now and then, as Christine has to do a checkup every six months and anxiously waits to know if she really is recovered from cancer; but it feels more like a side note than the essence of the book.
The essence of the book, really, is the wind turbines being installed 500 meters from their house. That's where the book really takes a turn for the worse as Niall and Christine both write extensively (Niall more than Christine, again) about their anger and complain at lengths about the wind turbines and the damage - trees being felled, roads having to be widened, the noise, the ruined landlscape. Anyone can sympathise with that, I doubt Greta Thunberg herself would enjoy living so close to three wind turbines. However Niall Williams writes so much about it that it becomes.... suspicious. Environmental concerns are only brought up in the last few chapters of the book, and while he recognises that green energy is important, he goes on and on about why wind turbines are not a good solution: they cost a lot of energy to make, they ruin the landscape, they are noisy. His solution? Have them all inside at sea, like what has been done in the US, so they are not visible and the noise cannot be heard. He fails to mention the fact that they will still take as much energy and create as much carbon to be made and transported to the sea - so really, the issue is just the proximity to his house, isn't it? It's fine - really, everyone understands that - but the bashing of "green energy" (he dislikes the term - it is not green as it creates a lot of carbon emission to be built and transported - which apparently defeats the point of having them installed) is too constant, too much. When he writes defensively that maybe he is just too old to understand, he seems aware of how he comes across: a boomer who never really thought about the environment and is devastated that the consequences of the crisis are reaching him.
When he describes seeing pheasants while on his walk to pick up some turf to burn in the fireplace, I had to laugh: peat is hardly a green energy, releases tons of carbon dioxide and their use accelerates climate change. When he casually mentions it after spending page after page complaining that wind turbines are not even "green", it's hard to believe this person actually reads about the environment or cares about it.
His rage about wind turbines being so near his house is, again, understandable. But I would have kept that rage for a sassy Tweet and not for 30 pages of my book on gardening.
I could go on but overall, this is a book that made me angry at times - the privilege that they never acknowledge, the hatred for the Green party ("the future will be much less green for going Green"), the poor writing many times - but there are also lovely passages. Christine's descriptions of what she grows are moving and genuine; Niall's recollections of his grandfather and his roses were enjoyable to read and very touching. But the whole book together felt clumsy and unfinished.
Free ARC received from Netgalley.
July 15, 2021
How do I start?... Well, I have always dreamed of going to Ireland...family history, Irish blood. Don't know if I'll ever get there in person but In Kiltumper let me spend a year there by reading.
Niall Williams and Christine Breen have written quite a few books and I have read most of them, but I think, and I will dare to say it...this is one of my favorites. You can feel the love for their home and native land that just lives in the words they share with us. What a gift they have and how lucky as readers are we to receive it.
Niall Williams and Christine Breen have written quite a few books and I have read most of them, but I think, and I will dare to say it...this is one of my favorites. You can feel the love for their home and native land that just lives in the words they share with us. What a gift they have and how lucky as readers are we to receive it.
Read
March 28, 2024a wonderful book that captures the simple joys of a carefully tended garden in a calendar year, whether it's watching the bees buzz and get drunk on the honey of flowers, setting free the birds that ate all the blueberries in a thorny bush, gathering bales of hay, tending peonies that could live for a hundred years, or trundling down roads in sheets of rain-- transient joys, as the author notes, in the transitional and unprecedented times of climate change.
January 17, 2022
Although I enjoy books about gardening, this was so much more. The authors are so interesting and likable. There is much worry and suspense during the course of the year about the arrival of wind turbines nearby. And just beautiful and thought-provoking writing.
May 5, 2022
I was very disappointed in this book. What I thought might be a charming reflection on gardening and on living in Ireland ended up being a complaint fest. True, it was interspersed with reflections and remembrances on their garden and some of those were lovely, but those charms were overshadowed by his rants on the wind turbines being installed on the nearby hill. The author insists he's not a "not in my backyard" person, but that is exactly what he is. He bemoans climate change and the effect it is having and will have on the earth, but then he and his wife do all they can to prevent a technology which can address that climate change from being implemented nearby. In this regard, he's no different than the West Virginia and Pennsylvania politicians who continue to promote coal mining and fracking because of the perceived impact on the people in their districts. We will all have to make sacrifices to save our planet. The author acknowledges he's in his early 60s (ad nauseum) as I am. He won't be around to experience the worst effects of climate change, so he isn't interested in sacrifice. It's such a selfish view, and unfortunately not uncommon in our age group. I'm also shocked at the number of invasive plants that are mentioned in the garden. All in all I found this book frustrating, disappointing and a downer.
December 31, 2021
Couple documents last year of pre pandemic normalcy in their garden in Ireland in 2019. First half offers lovely descriptions of the cycle of life for gardeners. Usually this kind of book is a comforting read, but tension is induced by the installation of wind turbines near their home. Descriptions of plants are then coupled with the authors' ruminations about climate change and, paradoxically, resentment of the changes brought about by the turbines. Left me with a papable sense of dread.
January 24, 2022
If you are a gardener your heart will melt, beautiful on so many levels, touching, disturbing, hopeful, can't recommend enough...
October 8, 2024
I don't usually read books about gardening, but on a friend's recommendation, this gem goes way beyond the garden! A beautifully written memoir of a year in rural Ireland and how an ever changing landscape affects the lives of those around it.
July 2, 2025
Enjoyed listening to both Christine Breen and Niall Williams read/narrate their respective contributions to this love letter to their garden and life in Kiltumper.
The difference in Williams's volubility and Breen's practical responses had its sweetly humorous moments. I wanted to hear even more from Breen, and yet appreciated all of William's flights of optimistic fancy.
The difference in Williams's volubility and Breen's practical responses had its sweetly humorous moments. I wanted to hear even more from Breen, and yet appreciated all of William's flights of optimistic fancy.
May 28, 2021
In Kiltumper by Niall Williams and Christine Breen is a wonderful book that has so many components. It is: nature, reflections and memoir, gardening, and also part inspiration.
This is the first book that I have had the privilege of reading from this author duo, and now I am most certainly a fan. I have already been exploring their previous books, as I am so enamored by this book.
This book takes the reader in this couple’s home, lives, grounds, garden, and at times inner being, as a full calendar year goes by. We can see, smell, envision, feel, and almost experience the colors, sensations, work, textures, and sounds that surround them in their garden and home.
The ability to transcribe all of these concepts into prose is just stunning. They take us inside not only their grounds and daily lives, but also their most vulnerable segments of their world. It was fascinating, reflective, personal, and touching. I really felt as if I was there, and I have known them for a lifetime. The transitions from one subject to the next, from one season to another, were smooth and effortless. The balance of memoir and nature was perfect.
I truly loved this book and I hope we will be able to continue to follow along with them on their journey.
5/5 stars
Thank you NG and Bloomsbury Publishing for this wonderful arc and in return I am submitting my unbiased and voluntary review and opinion.
I am posting this review to my GR and Bookbub accounts immediately and will post it to my Amazon, Instagram, and B&N accounts upon publication.
This is the first book that I have had the privilege of reading from this author duo, and now I am most certainly a fan. I have already been exploring their previous books, as I am so enamored by this book.
This book takes the reader in this couple’s home, lives, grounds, garden, and at times inner being, as a full calendar year goes by. We can see, smell, envision, feel, and almost experience the colors, sensations, work, textures, and sounds that surround them in their garden and home.
The ability to transcribe all of these concepts into prose is just stunning. They take us inside not only their grounds and daily lives, but also their most vulnerable segments of their world. It was fascinating, reflective, personal, and touching. I really felt as if I was there, and I have known them for a lifetime. The transitions from one subject to the next, from one season to another, were smooth and effortless. The balance of memoir and nature was perfect.
I truly loved this book and I hope we will be able to continue to follow along with them on their journey.
5/5 stars
Thank you NG and Bloomsbury Publishing for this wonderful arc and in return I am submitting my unbiased and voluntary review and opinion.
I am posting this review to my GR and Bookbub accounts immediately and will post it to my Amazon, Instagram, and B&N accounts upon publication.
May 10, 2022
Settling into this book, the words of the authors and the land of Kiltumper, was a joy. Heartbreaking and filled with wonder, it was a gift to see the world through the eyes of Niall and Chris. Life, aging, death, community, power, connection, passion, purpose, home. So much is here and their voices are so lovingly paired with deep descriptions of the life and garden they have built together. So come, visit Kiltumper for a while, and see just what you can learn by sitting in the stillness and sticking your toes into the warm soil (even if it is just in your mind). At one point, Niall quotes Henry Mitchell: 'Almost any garden, if you see it at just the right moment, can be confused with paradise.' And Kiltumper sounds like paradise, indeed.
Chris - if you ever read this, thank you. And tell Niall (who never reads reviews) thanks as well.
Chris - if you ever read this, thank you. And tell Niall (who never reads reviews) thanks as well.
August 14, 2021
Originally posted on my blog: Nonstop Reader.
In Kiltumper is a wonderfully written ode to gardening passion and life, and an engaging personal biography of an Irish garden by Niall Williams and Christine Breen. Due out in late Aug 2021 from Bloomsbury, it's 304 pages and will be available in hardcover, audio, and ebook formats.
It's presented in chronological chapters, starting in January, and contains snippets and conversations from the owner/residents about how they came to move to Ireland from New York 35 years ago to make a life in the countryside writing and gardening and how they have impacted the place they live and how it's also shaped them, profoundly. It contains a number of rough line drawn illustrations which go very well with the casual, intimate details of the year and what their gardening life has entailed.
There's an almost lyrical quality to the writing, told in both the authors' voices in contrapuntal prose. The voices are delineated by typeset - italics interspersed with plain text and ruminating on subjects as diverse as climate change and windmill turbines to Christine Breen's encounters with cancer and subsequent treatments and recovery (including a truly harrowing account of her extreme allergic reaction to chemotherapy - *brr*).
Apart from the cover, which is lush and beautiful, the book doesn't contain any photographs, just beautifully written prose and the simple line drawings. I found it a perfect companion for a week's slow reading enjoyment. This would be a good choice for library acquisition, for gardeners, and lovers of horticulture, as well as making a lovely gift.
Five stars.
Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.
In Kiltumper is a wonderfully written ode to gardening passion and life, and an engaging personal biography of an Irish garden by Niall Williams and Christine Breen. Due out in late Aug 2021 from Bloomsbury, it's 304 pages and will be available in hardcover, audio, and ebook formats.
It's presented in chronological chapters, starting in January, and contains snippets and conversations from the owner/residents about how they came to move to Ireland from New York 35 years ago to make a life in the countryside writing and gardening and how they have impacted the place they live and how it's also shaped them, profoundly. It contains a number of rough line drawn illustrations which go very well with the casual, intimate details of the year and what their gardening life has entailed.
There's an almost lyrical quality to the writing, told in both the authors' voices in contrapuntal prose. The voices are delineated by typeset - italics interspersed with plain text and ruminating on subjects as diverse as climate change and windmill turbines to Christine Breen's encounters with cancer and subsequent treatments and recovery (including a truly harrowing account of her extreme allergic reaction to chemotherapy - *brr*).
Apart from the cover, which is lush and beautiful, the book doesn't contain any photographs, just beautifully written prose and the simple line drawings. I found it a perfect companion for a week's slow reading enjoyment. This would be a good choice for library acquisition, for gardeners, and lovers of horticulture, as well as making a lovely gift.
Five stars.
Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.
May 13, 2022
The authors write beautifully about their garden, how they have made it over the past 34 years and how it has shaped them. It was relaxing to read about their garden throughout the year, but this book is more than just a garden journal. In addition to writing about their garden, they reflect on the impact nearby wind turbines will have on their garden and their home life. I never realized that in order to implement green energy, the green space that it is supposed to be saving must be sacrificed. I've never given much thought to the environmental impact of wind farms other than that they are cleaner than fossil fuels. This book has left me wondering about the future and asking if we really want to make changes that will result in a greener and cleaner world, or do we want to continue living just as we do now?
July 6, 2022
I loved spending time with this author and his wife in their remote garden in County Clare. A beautiful reflection of life in a very specific time and place. It has been close to 30 years when I first read their memoir (O Come Ye Back) of moving to this same cottage in Ireland. I was probably 20 or 21 and had spent a year abroad in Dublin, but drawn to the countryside in side trips to remote places in Galway, Sligo, Kerry, Clare — and hopeful of the same kind of experience, if not in reality then vicariously through their stories. This book makes readers slow down and notice, captures the moments of hope and worry and wonder in both the garden and in life.
July 25, 2021
"The peas aren't happy, Niall" said Chris. No one but a gardener who is so attuned to the earth and it's surroundings would say that. I was mesmerized by the leap of faith this couple took three decades or more ago to move to Ireland and live on their writing and gardening skills. I suspect there are many of us who would jump at the chance for such a life although then and now it wasn't always easy but nothing can compare to the solace of a gardening life.
All gardeners face weather vagaries and animal interference but the wind turbines! So close and such an abomination of noise. I am reminded of a wooden statue of a man in prison garb hanging his head and it was entitled "What will the harvest be?" We need to save our world by using less fossil fuel but at what cost if it means tearing up the beautiful countryside.
Needless to say, I truly enjoyed this book and thank Goodreads for a copy for my review.
All gardeners face weather vagaries and animal interference but the wind turbines! So close and such an abomination of noise. I am reminded of a wooden statue of a man in prison garb hanging his head and it was entitled "What will the harvest be?" We need to save our world by using less fossil fuel but at what cost if it means tearing up the beautiful countryside.
Needless to say, I truly enjoyed this book and thank Goodreads for a copy for my review.
December 26, 2025
In truth a soft 3.5 but I love Niall so I'm rounding up. This is a slow moving sweet meditation on tending a garden, and choosing to live a simple quiet way of life. As a writer, Niall crafts thoughts and phrases so beautifully it actually makes me cry. Like actual tears. I know that sounds melodramatic but I feel so seen (as a writer, a thinker and a human) by his writing, unlike any other author I enjoy.
"The future when it comes is never the one imagined."
"Home truths: I know no other way to write other than the personal way. And it is always about love."
"The future when it comes is never the one imagined."
"Home truths: I know no other way to write other than the personal way. And it is always about love."
June 15, 2025
I loved this. It was the sweetest story of an older Irish couple and their garden. It covered the span of a year with each month being a chapter. His wife battles cancer and they mourn the loss of their pure countryside with the arrival of wind turbines. I thought it did a beautiful job weaving all the storylines together in their memoir
December 26, 2021
A lovely read. Off now to find a packet of anchusa seed for my garden
February 14, 2023
This beautifully written, meditative book will delight all gardeners, would be or otherwise.
September 16, 2025
The audio of this book was so calming and felt like a hug. Do yourself a favor and listen!
October 15, 2024
I absolutely loved listening to this book and will buy a hard copy for my shelf. You don’t have to be a gardener to relate to this book, but if you are it will resonate deeply. Having a love and respect for nature, and all that entails, will certainly make you feel connected to the words in this book. The narration is lovely, soothing and heartfelt.
July 10, 2021
Generations of gardening is the backdrop for this memoir, the current gardeners of the family home falls to Niall and Christine. Happily married and at total peace with their relationship, families, environment and lives Niall and christine describe the four seasons in the remote west Ireland. However bliss is shattered when the wind turbines arrive, a sign of environmental progress for most, where the actual turbines are placed has an impact on the few. I enjoyed the writing group’s chapter and would love to go on a course there one day. A great deal of information on the various planting and irrigation, not really my thing but found the information so well described I could imagine the garden. If you like gardening in windswept environs then you will love this. I liked the human side of the book, the humour, the family, neighbours, contractors, writers and Niall & Chris. Thank you #NetGalley for the copy to review.
August 27, 2025
"Money is never the right answer if the question is earth."
I initially struggled with this book; after the third time he brought up the wind turbines that were being put up near his home, I found myself melancholic and thought 'oh this is going to be a depressing book, maybe I shouldn't read it'.
But as I sat with the feeling, I realized it wasn't his bemoaning the turbines that bothered me, but the concept of mankind disrupting wild pure land for its own purposes that I am troubled by. I myself am too familiar with this feeling; I distinctly recall being brought to tears when I saw a small wilderness near my Tucson home razed to the ground to build a hideous housing complex. I'd driven by it so many times over the years, seen the birds flitting through the mesquite and the cactus, smelled the javelina musk, admired the centuries-old saguaro, and to see it all smothered in just a few days for a handful of homes was devastating to me. It was a huge loss of life that was utterly heart-stopping, particularly when there were so many empty dilapidated homes downtown that could be fixed up if the housing situation were really so dire. This wasn't the first time I'd felt this devastation, nor was it the last. In fact, even now that I've moved to Ireland, I see the posted 'site development plans' on fences around a small wilderness and find myself mourning.
I have a deep compassion, a reverence for nature that I don't often find mirrored in society. Reading this book, and finding that someone else feels the same as I do was a deep comfort. Maybe I'm just a delicate flower in this harsh world - but have you ever really, truly looked at a flower, felt its presence, it's determination to live, to exist? By god, it's beautiful.
We can imagine what will come, and it will be wonderful, while a the same time, it will be more than we can possibly imagine. You can't out-imagine the reality of spring. It is greater than human dreaming."
"In the guard that is in garden, in the sense of an enclosure, and, importantly, something protected. This, more than the idea of cultivation, is what seems central to me these days. In this enclosed space in Kiltumper, we will protect and nourish what is here. That is what we are doing when we say we are gardening."
"It is not yet Little Christmas, but the pulse of the spring that is still underground has entered you. You are the same as all that hold within it the returning life, and your version of that is to be outside."
"It is simply the natural extension of our living her, and as close as we get to having a relationship with the earth, not the one with a capital E, not the grand vast ungraspable wholeness of the thing that the steel turbines are said to be saving, but the portion of mud, clay, and stone that live with us."
"The fact of tending the ground, feeding the worms I suppose, and that there is something absolutely right in this, and that the smallness of it, the most local of localities, the garden in Kiltumper, is enough world, enough earth, for a lifetime."
"Think how terrible it would be if you stepped outside, looked around and concluded: nothing needs doing, the garden is perfect. It would be the end of the relationship, and by extension our living with and on the planet. So, no, a garden can't be done."
"There is some inconvenience: in the swooping of their flights in and out as people come and go, often startled by the speed and dash of the birds, and in the little black-and-white bombed hillock of their droppings, but this is nothing to the joy, first when they return, second when you see, suddenly, a nest has appeared, third, when you can see and hear the beaks of the chicks up there, and last, when the family all take to the air. You feel you've been part of something, something that has happened here for a long time, and with a sense of life, of aliveness quietly continuing, despite all that is terrible and dispiriting in the world of mankind."
"We never think of Eden as a garden that needed clearing or maintenance; I suppose the logic is it was Before the Fall and therefore Perfect, but if it was a living place, if the plants in it grew, then they would grow too large and crowd each other and need pruning and dividing and all the rest of it. If they didn't grow, it wasn't a garden as we know it. [...] a garden, as I understand it, is a thing that is inextricable both from change and from human activity; it needs us to exist. A wilderness is not a garden. [...] A mown path is what makes it a 'garden', if it can be considered one. The path is what invites you. And part of that invitation is that when you see the opening through the tall grasses you connect to the mind that first imagined it and think: Look, here's a way to go. In other words, it's a human connection."
"I have often been surprised [...] by journalists asking me if it really rains in Clare as much as it does in my books. The question was genuine, and in time I realized that it was being asked by people who largely lived and worked indoors, who in the course of a normal day spent few hours actually outside. Weather then was a factor confined to the morning commute, lunchtimes, weekends, and in realizing this a couple of things struck me, first that I was fortunate enough to know the rain at first hand, and second that for most people climate change would remain an abstraction until the streets were flooded or the taps yielded no water."
"Those living on the margins forget the center, as it has forgotten them. The margin becomes the center of a different entity, a portion of which is unmapped and invisible."
"I would never have imagined, could never hand, what I would feel looking at the ansence where for more thatn hald of my life that tree had been. The physical presence of it had become part of my known world, and really, I had taken it for granted [...] It was just there, and only now, when it was gone, dd I feel its loss as one of the fixtures of the place [...] I can't see past the vacancy, and the failure in myself to have fully appreciate the tree that is now gone."
"Once, these stones were picked day after day, often by large families of children, to make the fields, stones brought to the perimeters for the building of the walls. Whole families were in the making. The stone walls hold the history of their hands, and though the walls are here and there off-kilter, here and there tumble-style, or overgrown with blackberry brambles, they have the dignity of their makers. The walls are literally full of time and, as with the trees, when gone, are missed more than they were loved."
"It's the same as when you ask someone to show you the carbon calculation of all the months of digging, site-clearing, tree-felling, quarrying, loading, cement-mixing, transporting, unloading, road-widening, construction, erection, connection to the grid, and ask them to add to that the making of the steel of the turbines, the blades, in a location hundred of miles away, and tot onto that the transportation of the same in vehicles burning fossil fuels, and when you've done that carbon maths, show me the figure versus the green energy value of two turbines. And when they can't tell you that figure, you'll find yourself thinking this is all more about profit than climate."
"Relevance is too low a measure to apply to any art."
"I never think what value had the countryside? And, forced to now, cannot compute it in actual or monetary terms. Which is maybe why I am not a real farmer, and will never threaten to be wealthy. When I think of the countryside, I think of it mostly in spiritual terms."
"Is this the purpose of wild and remote places? To be employed in the cause of keeping the lights on in urban ones? This seems less about changing the way we are living, taking responsibility for resources and how we use them, and more about simply changing where the energy is to come from. Replace the fossil fuel with wind and sun and the cities of the world can carry on before, illumined through the night. It seems to me a caustic irony that in the rush to embrace a greener way it is the actual green places that count least."
"It [Christmas] is imposed, I know, the day like any other in reality, but the imprint of millennia is not to be easily ignored."
I initially struggled with this book; after the third time he brought up the wind turbines that were being put up near his home, I found myself melancholic and thought 'oh this is going to be a depressing book, maybe I shouldn't read it'.
But as I sat with the feeling, I realized it wasn't his bemoaning the turbines that bothered me, but the concept of mankind disrupting wild pure land for its own purposes that I am troubled by. I myself am too familiar with this feeling; I distinctly recall being brought to tears when I saw a small wilderness near my Tucson home razed to the ground to build a hideous housing complex. I'd driven by it so many times over the years, seen the birds flitting through the mesquite and the cactus, smelled the javelina musk, admired the centuries-old saguaro, and to see it all smothered in just a few days for a handful of homes was devastating to me. It was a huge loss of life that was utterly heart-stopping, particularly when there were so many empty dilapidated homes downtown that could be fixed up if the housing situation were really so dire. This wasn't the first time I'd felt this devastation, nor was it the last. In fact, even now that I've moved to Ireland, I see the posted 'site development plans' on fences around a small wilderness and find myself mourning.
I have a deep compassion, a reverence for nature that I don't often find mirrored in society. Reading this book, and finding that someone else feels the same as I do was a deep comfort. Maybe I'm just a delicate flower in this harsh world - but have you ever really, truly looked at a flower, felt its presence, it's determination to live, to exist? By god, it's beautiful.
We can imagine what will come, and it will be wonderful, while a the same time, it will be more than we can possibly imagine. You can't out-imagine the reality of spring. It is greater than human dreaming."
"In the guard that is in garden, in the sense of an enclosure, and, importantly, something protected. This, more than the idea of cultivation, is what seems central to me these days. In this enclosed space in Kiltumper, we will protect and nourish what is here. That is what we are doing when we say we are gardening."
"It is not yet Little Christmas, but the pulse of the spring that is still underground has entered you. You are the same as all that hold within it the returning life, and your version of that is to be outside."
"It is simply the natural extension of our living her, and as close as we get to having a relationship with the earth, not the one with a capital E, not the grand vast ungraspable wholeness of the thing that the steel turbines are said to be saving, but the portion of mud, clay, and stone that live with us."
"The fact of tending the ground, feeding the worms I suppose, and that there is something absolutely right in this, and that the smallness of it, the most local of localities, the garden in Kiltumper, is enough world, enough earth, for a lifetime."
"Think how terrible it would be if you stepped outside, looked around and concluded: nothing needs doing, the garden is perfect. It would be the end of the relationship, and by extension our living with and on the planet. So, no, a garden can't be done."
"There is some inconvenience: in the swooping of their flights in and out as people come and go, often startled by the speed and dash of the birds, and in the little black-and-white bombed hillock of their droppings, but this is nothing to the joy, first when they return, second when you see, suddenly, a nest has appeared, third, when you can see and hear the beaks of the chicks up there, and last, when the family all take to the air. You feel you've been part of something, something that has happened here for a long time, and with a sense of life, of aliveness quietly continuing, despite all that is terrible and dispiriting in the world of mankind."
"We never think of Eden as a garden that needed clearing or maintenance; I suppose the logic is it was Before the Fall and therefore Perfect, but if it was a living place, if the plants in it grew, then they would grow too large and crowd each other and need pruning and dividing and all the rest of it. If they didn't grow, it wasn't a garden as we know it. [...] a garden, as I understand it, is a thing that is inextricable both from change and from human activity; it needs us to exist. A wilderness is not a garden. [...] A mown path is what makes it a 'garden', if it can be considered one. The path is what invites you. And part of that invitation is that when you see the opening through the tall grasses you connect to the mind that first imagined it and think: Look, here's a way to go. In other words, it's a human connection."
"I have often been surprised [...] by journalists asking me if it really rains in Clare as much as it does in my books. The question was genuine, and in time I realized that it was being asked by people who largely lived and worked indoors, who in the course of a normal day spent few hours actually outside. Weather then was a factor confined to the morning commute, lunchtimes, weekends, and in realizing this a couple of things struck me, first that I was fortunate enough to know the rain at first hand, and second that for most people climate change would remain an abstraction until the streets were flooded or the taps yielded no water."
"Those living on the margins forget the center, as it has forgotten them. The margin becomes the center of a different entity, a portion of which is unmapped and invisible."
"I would never have imagined, could never hand, what I would feel looking at the ansence where for more thatn hald of my life that tree had been. The physical presence of it had become part of my known world, and really, I had taken it for granted [...] It was just there, and only now, when it was gone, dd I feel its loss as one of the fixtures of the place [...] I can't see past the vacancy, and the failure in myself to have fully appreciate the tree that is now gone."
"Once, these stones were picked day after day, often by large families of children, to make the fields, stones brought to the perimeters for the building of the walls. Whole families were in the making. The stone walls hold the history of their hands, and though the walls are here and there off-kilter, here and there tumble-style, or overgrown with blackberry brambles, they have the dignity of their makers. The walls are literally full of time and, as with the trees, when gone, are missed more than they were loved."
"It's the same as when you ask someone to show you the carbon calculation of all the months of digging, site-clearing, tree-felling, quarrying, loading, cement-mixing, transporting, unloading, road-widening, construction, erection, connection to the grid, and ask them to add to that the making of the steel of the turbines, the blades, in a location hundred of miles away, and tot onto that the transportation of the same in vehicles burning fossil fuels, and when you've done that carbon maths, show me the figure versus the green energy value of two turbines. And when they can't tell you that figure, you'll find yourself thinking this is all more about profit than climate."
"Relevance is too low a measure to apply to any art."
"I never think what value had the countryside? And, forced to now, cannot compute it in actual or monetary terms. Which is maybe why I am not a real farmer, and will never threaten to be wealthy. When I think of the countryside, I think of it mostly in spiritual terms."
"Is this the purpose of wild and remote places? To be employed in the cause of keeping the lights on in urban ones? This seems less about changing the way we are living, taking responsibility for resources and how we use them, and more about simply changing where the energy is to come from. Replace the fossil fuel with wind and sun and the cities of the world can carry on before, illumined through the night. It seems to me a caustic irony that in the rush to embrace a greener way it is the actual green places that count least."
"It [Christmas] is imposed, I know, the day like any other in reality, but the imprint of millennia is not to be easily ignored."
December 8, 2023
Written by two authors, "In Kiltumper A Year in an Irish Garden" is a treasure trove of beauty and stillness, a book that reminds us to treasure the light for it's fleeting, "nymph-footed" glory.
With so much to feel cynical and sorrowful about in a world torn apart by endless, mindless and pointless wars and a value system toppling precariously on the idolatry of money it is refreshing to know that in one little corner of Ireland two worldly people have found a way to live in harmony with nature and each other. I particularly admire the love Niall Williams has for his wife, the pure lens through which he frames her, a sprite, a caretaker of Nature, a lady gifted with such special powers of observation she notices a broken stem or a struggling hedge.
Both Christine Breen and her husband Niall Williams write beautifully and I marked so many pages with a view to quoting I now am challenged to limit them to just two.
From Niall: "when I put one of the borage blooms in my mouth, I am momentarily other, thinking of nectar and bees and sunshine, and have, if not a winged feeling, certainly the air-giddiness of eating flowers."
From Christine: "Country living teaches you things. It teaches you about darkness and stars, about sunlight and silence, about things out of your control like when wind uproots a tree, it teaches you that the berries and the birds are wintering with you and perhaps wondering like you what is happening. It teaches you that the road will always be there, ahead of you and behind you."
And perhaps it is this feeling of allowing nature's course and relinquishing the props of modern society that gives me hope. Niall with his feeling of being "other", Christine with her reverence for nature and both for the life they have chosen after living and working in New York where they say if you can make it there you'll make it anywhere. Well, I'd like to reverse it and say that if Niall and Christine can make it in the remote and wildly beautiful Kiltumper then we can all make more of our allotment. We can all grow something.
It is a gift of renewal they have given us, a blueprint for Eden. To see the wealth in a seed, the soul of a sunrise, the value of sustainability and beauty. Everyone should read this book and find the hope and inspiration to plant a seed.
With so much to feel cynical and sorrowful about in a world torn apart by endless, mindless and pointless wars and a value system toppling precariously on the idolatry of money it is refreshing to know that in one little corner of Ireland two worldly people have found a way to live in harmony with nature and each other. I particularly admire the love Niall Williams has for his wife, the pure lens through which he frames her, a sprite, a caretaker of Nature, a lady gifted with such special powers of observation she notices a broken stem or a struggling hedge.
Both Christine Breen and her husband Niall Williams write beautifully and I marked so many pages with a view to quoting I now am challenged to limit them to just two.
From Niall: "when I put one of the borage blooms in my mouth, I am momentarily other, thinking of nectar and bees and sunshine, and have, if not a winged feeling, certainly the air-giddiness of eating flowers."
From Christine: "Country living teaches you things. It teaches you about darkness and stars, about sunlight and silence, about things out of your control like when wind uproots a tree, it teaches you that the berries and the birds are wintering with you and perhaps wondering like you what is happening. It teaches you that the road will always be there, ahead of you and behind you."
And perhaps it is this feeling of allowing nature's course and relinquishing the props of modern society that gives me hope. Niall with his feeling of being "other", Christine with her reverence for nature and both for the life they have chosen after living and working in New York where they say if you can make it there you'll make it anywhere. Well, I'd like to reverse it and say that if Niall and Christine can make it in the remote and wildly beautiful Kiltumper then we can all make more of our allotment. We can all grow something.
It is a gift of renewal they have given us, a blueprint for Eden. To see the wealth in a seed, the soul of a sunrise, the value of sustainability and beauty. Everyone should read this book and find the hope and inspiration to plant a seed.
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