In 2020, when COVID-19 first began transforming life in the United States, plenty of people took up new activities or doubled down on existing ones. In the case of Port Clyde resident Margot Anne Kelley, that activity was gardening – and her new book, “A Gardener at the End of the World,” is her chronicle of 2020, as a pandemic altered American society and one Maine resident took refuge in the careful cultivation of crops. The prospect of revisiting 2020 might seem daunting to some readers, but Kelley is an empathic guide to the year on scales both large and small.
The overlap between human society and the natural world is territory Kelley has explored in her earlier books, including “Foodtopia” and “A Field Guide to Other People’s Trees.” Here, she proves willing to follow lines of inquiry to unexpected places and find small linguistic joys in the seeds and plants that she encounters. “A Gardener at the End of the World” By Margot Anne Kelley Godine, 233 pages $28.
95 Kelley is skilled at setting a scene. Growing spinach might not sound like a visually striking activity, and yet this passage finds the fascinating and unnerving in the quotidian: “The spinaches come next, their cotyledons long and narrow like slender pairs of grass blades. The seed coats get stuck on the leaf tips, squeezing them together until they have heft enough to spring free.
” Elsewhere, Kelley finds memorable ways to describe familiar sights, from her hometown’s location “half.
