A mindful, seasonal tale of a year in the garden

Seed to Dust

A wonderful, life-enhancing book which follows a year in the life of a professional gardener and the relationship he has with the woman who employs him to look after her 12-acre garden.

Written as a monthly journal, this is more memoir and philosophical meditation than gardener's manual... Hamer uses the material all around - robins and crows, beeches and cherry trees, jasmine, daffodils and soil - as the springboard for reflections on how to live a small-scale, spiritually aware life. ...making the case for seeing our place within nature, and relishing our contact with it.

Hamer takes the reader through his gardening year... Marc Hamer's gardening memoir offers an insight into what it is like to tend somebody else's plot, and how an unusual relationship blossomed...Seed to Dust is a bodily book. Hamer lets us in; we learn what his tools feel like in hands hardened by decades of manual labour...But it is also an unlikely love story: Hamer is happily married to Peggy, who we hear about, too, but his affection for Miss Cashmere, his elderly employer, is clear - and infectious.

Inspirational... An invaluably original view of one man in his garden...noticing the tiny things that the busy world ignores... A wholly original book on how to live, how to be calm and content with only a little, in a quietly humming garden

Seed to Dust draws on Hamer's deep sense of connection with plants and the earth as well as a lifetime of experience. Beautifully observed and quietly reflective, this is an absorbing and life-affirming read

Sue Stuart-Smith, Sunday Times bestselling author of The Well-Gardened Mind

Chapters...shimmer like lantern slides, lit with luminous imagery... Seed to Dust is an invitation to read this world as Mr. Hamer does - with a close eye to what changes, and what does not

[An] absorbing combination of memoir, gardening folklore and natural history... This book provides insight into both the secrets of a garden and the experiences of the person caring for it

This book hit me straight in the heart like a whippy branch and like no other book has ever done

Marc Hamer was born in the North of England and moved to Wales over thirty years ago. After spending a period homeless, then working on the railway, he returned to education and studied fine art in Manchester and Stoke-on-Trent. He has worked in art galleries, marketing, graphic design and taught creative writing in a prison before becoming a gardener. Both his books, A Life in Nature; or How to Catch a Mole and Seed to Dust have been longlisted for the Wainwright Prize.

*SHORTLISTED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE 2021* 
 
 'A wholly original, semi-autobiographical book on how to live, how to be calm and content with only a little, in a quietly humming garden' Daily Mail 
 
Beautifully illustrated, Seed to Dust is a reflective and restorative account of a life lived in harmony with nature. 
 
Marc Hamer has nurtured the same twelve acres of garden for decades. It's rarely visited so he is the only person who fully knows its secrets. But it's not his garden, and his relationship with its owner is at once distant and curiously intimate. 
 
 In Seed to Dust, Marc takes us month-by-month through his experiences both working in the garden and outside it. We encounter new plants and wildlife, gardening folklore and the joys of manual work; we learn, too, about Marc's path from homelessness to family contentment, and the cycles of change that run through both the garden's life and our own. 
 
'An absorbing combination of memoir, gardening folklore and natural history' Country Life 
 
'Life-affirming... Absorbing' Sue Stuart-Smith, Sunday Times bestselling author of The Well-Gardened Mind

Or How to Catch a Mole

A Life in Nature

A captivating, life-affirming memoir of a life in nature that celebrates finding wonder in our world

In lyrical prose, Hamer revealed a curious kinship with moles - creatures who, like him, often work alone. Like Laurie Lee, Hamer is an elegist, attracted to what's beautiful precisely because it's poised to pass away.

From the first few words I knew I had encountered loving honesty and no one needs more than that. It is rare to encounter such respect and understanding of nature for herself.

Rosamund Young, author of The Secret Life of Cows

How To Catch A Mole is a beguiling mixture: part autobiography, part handbook, part travel book, part philosophical treatise. I’m happy to report that it succeeds on each level

Not only a compelling meditation on the 'little gentleman in black velvet'…but also a fascinating, lyrical account of the loneliness and beauty of life on the margins, a memoir of vagrancy

This is a wonderful book about our relationship with the earth, with other animals and with our own troubled humanity. It has taught me a lot. I feel great love for it.

How to Catch a Mole is a beautiful, elegiac ode to a remarkable creature. It’s also an exploration of Hamer’s life as he approaches his sunset years. Each page is filled with wonder, love, regret, humility and a sense of wonder (and oneness) with nature.

[How To Catch a Mole] has the feel of an enduring classic. It is the testament of a man who has learnt to see, who has the nerve to interrogate his own annihilation and who…handles language superbly

Marc tells his story and explores what moles, and a life in nature, can tell us about our own humanity and our search for contentment.

[Hamer] offers us some heart-rending images which linger in the mind long after you’ve closed the book

Marc Hamer's uplifting writings shed some light on the velvety creatures burrowing beneath our countryside.

Marc Hamer's wonderful How To Catch A Mole took me completely by surprise. It certainly is a book about 
catching moles but it is also a book of sound philosophy, poignant biography and a zen-like meditation on life and nature. Brilliant.

The wisdom contained in this elegiac and intensely moving book doesn't need embellishing

It's not often you meet a mole-catcher, let alone read their story. Marc Hamer's uplifting writings shed some light on the velvety creatures burrowing beneath our countryside

[A] distinctive, quietly revelatory, book…a somewhat unlikely interplay of Hamer’s easeful poetry and observations with accounts of both the specialist life of moles and his own biography. Skilfully woven with eloquent simplicity, it offers a rich and sustained meditation on the task of apprehending the complex and delicate interconnectedness of life and land

A distinctive, quietly revelatory book... a rich and sustained meditation on the task of apprehending the complex and delicate interconnectedness of life and land. Its pages have much to teach us.

A beguiling mixture of autobiography, practical handbook and philosophical treatise

A haunting memoir... [Hamer] writes of them [moles] and their underground lives with deep knowledge and tenderness, finding in their solitary habits an echo of his own vagrant nature

A captivating, life-affirming memoir of a life in nature that celebrates finding wonder in our world. 
 
'A wonderful book... It has taught me a lot. I feel great love for it' MAX PORTER 
 
At the age of sixteen, Marc Hamer left home with only a rucksack and started walking. By day, he observed the animals and birds. By night, he slept under hedges, in woodlands and on riverbanks. It was the beginning of a life in nature. 
 
Years later, now working as a gardener and mole-catcher in the Welsh countryside, Marc tells of the experiences that have shaped him and of the wonders that he encounters each day. He considers, too, the fascinating ways of the mole and the myths that surround this curious creature. 
 
This beautiful, meditative book explores what nature can teach us about ourselves and our search for contentment. It is a celebration of living peacefully and finding joy in the world around us. 
 
'It is rare to encounter such respect and understanding of nature' Rosamund Young, author of The Secret Life of Cows 
 
** Longlisted for The Wainwright Prize 2019 ** 
 
(Published in hardback as How to Catch a Mole)

And Find Yourself in Nature

How to Catch a Mole

A life-affirming book about the British countryside, the cycle of nature, solitude, mortality and contentment, through the prism of a brilliant new nature writer’s experience working as a traditional mole-catcher.

A double portrait: of the difficult, lonely, and intense domesticity of both moles and Hamer

Longlisted for the Wainwright Book Prize 2019 
 
A calming, life-affirming book about the British countryside, the cycle of nature, solitude and contentment, by a brilliant new nature writer who spent time homeless as a young man, sleeping in the hedgerows he now knows so well. 
 
Although common, moles are mysterious: their habits are inscrutable, they are anatomically bizarre, and they live completely alone. Marc Hamer has come closer to them than most, both through his long working life out in the Welsh countryside, and his experiences of rural homelessness as a boy. 
 
Over the years, Marc has learned a great deal about these small, velvet creatures who live in the dark beneath us, and the myths that surround them, and his work has also led him to a wise and uplifting acceptance of the inevitable changes that we all face. In this beautiful and meditative book, Marc tells his story and explores what moles, and a life in nature, can tell us about our own humanity and our search for contentment. 
 
How to Catch a Mole is a gem of nature writing, beautifully illustrated by Joe McLaren, which celebrates living peacefully and finding wonder in the world around us.

Marc Hamer

A memoir infused with wisdom and a deep love of nature, as well as a how-to book for finding peace of mind

Hamer's prose proceeds by association and by charismatic detail... but it also has a strong sense of arc, of change...He has an inclination to celebrate and express love-an inclination that seems built out of the humus of a difficult childhood...he is not an Adam cast out of the garden but "a boy cast out of hell," and into a series of gardens.

Marc Hamer knows how to live - simply, sparely, reverently, abundantly. Spring Rain is a tonic for the soul.

Sy Montgomery, author of How to Be A Good Creature

Interwoven with the writer's deep-seated love of the natural world... I highlighted many passages while reading this book

A breathtaking narrative that transcends genre and geography.

Hamer explains why a garden is not just a place of work - it's also a place of worship.

Mr. Hamer has found his ideal calling in this book stitched together from small essays, a genre in which such capricious mutability of opinion is not only tolerated but encouraged. Through his words, we connect with the ultimate text, the landscape itself.

Hamer's signature prose, rich with precise, detailed observations that evoke the luminous wonder that informs and illuminates all being, is on full display

A book of great but tender power; acute, wise and intimately observed, speaking with the unmistakable voice of the land itself - which is equally unmistakably Hamer's own. And what a voice that is!

Charles Foster, author of Cry of the Wild

'A sublime meditation on life, love, nature and family, woven with the wisdom of age gained through a life well lived'

Hamer has a canny way of divining the sacred in the quotidian

No facet of nature, however subtle, eludes Marc Hamer - and I relish being invited along on each intimate adventure

Margaret Roach, author of A Way to Garden

A wonderful book about our relationship with the earth, with other animals and with our own troubled humanity. It has taught me a lot. I feel great love for it

Max Porter, on How to Catch a Mole: A Life in Nature

A wholly original, semi-autobiographical book on how to live, how to be calm and content with only a little, in a quietly humming garden

From a hardscrabble childhood and vagrancy to the life-enhancing rewards of nurturing both 12 acres and an unusual friendship... Hamer meditations take similar forms, starting down to earth, if not actually in it, and ending taking off for the skies one way or another. His prose mimics this, beginning earthy and becoming airy.

A fascinating, lyrical account of the loneliness and beauty of life on the margins

Times Literary Supplement, on How to Catch a Mole: A Life in Nature

A beguiling and poetic memoir - illustrated with Hamer's line drawings - he encourages us to tune into the consoling rhythms of nature

Hamer lets us in; we learn what his tools feel like in hands hardened by decades of manual labour... But it is also an unlikely love story

Patterned with Hamer's gifts for observation, compression, and tone. . . I tend to think of a garden story as inevitably circular: every winter is followed by a spring, again and again. Hamer's garden story has that element, but it is as neighborly with the mortal arrow as it is with the return

Life's affirmation is to be found everywhere

Contentment between two covers; mindfulness told as a love story. Everyone should read this and feel a little better

Beloved author Marc Hamer writes about finding refuge in his tiny back garden in this highly original story of childhood, old age, and the restorative power of gardens. As a child, he kindled a deep love of the earth by watching plants and insects and exploring the world through a stack of old encyclopaedias he found in the shed. Now an old man, he creates a garden for himself in the neglected plot behind his house. 
 
A little book with a big heart: the insights glow as vivid as a flowerbed. If you want to be inspired, or you've lost your belief in the goodness of this world, this could be for you. 
 
'A sublime meditation on life, love, nature and family, woven with the wisdom gained through a life well lived' Lee Schofield, author of Wild Fell 
 
'A book of great but tender power' Charles Foster, author of Being a Beast 
 
'Patterned with Hamer's gifts for observation, compression, and tone' New Yorker 
 
'Rich and tender' New York Times

Marc Hamer

Praise for Spring Rain

A memoir infused with wisdom and a deep love of nature, as well as a how-to book for finding peace of mind

Hamer's prose proceeds by association and by charismatic detail... but it also has a strong sense of arc, of change...He has an inclination to celebrate and express love-an inclination that seems built ...

An illuminating, powerful read

A memoir infused with wisdom and a deep love of nature, as well as a how-to book for finding peace of mind

Hamer's prose proceeds by association and by charismatic detail... but it also has a strong sense of arc, of change...He has an inclination to celebrate and express love-an inclination that seems built ...

An illuminating, powerful read

A memoir infused with wisdom and a deep love of nature, as well as a how-to book for finding peace of mind

Hamer's prose proceeds by association and by charismatic detail... but it also has a strong sense of arc, of change...He has an inclination to celebrate and express love-an inclination that seems built ...

An illuminating, powerful read

Books by Marc Hamer

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