To Stand and Stare

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

There’s a lot of advice out there that would tell you how to do numerous things in your garden. 
But not so much that invites you to think about how to be while you’re out there. With increasingly busy lives, yet another list of chores seems like the very last thing any of us needs when it comes to our own practice of self-care, relaxation and renewal. After all, aren’t these the things we wanted to escape to the garden for in the first place? 

Put aside the ‘Jobs to do this week’ section in the Sunday papers. What if there was a more low-intervention way to garden, some reciprocal arrangement through which both you and your soil get fed, with the minimum degree of fuss, effort and guilt on your part, and the maximum measure of healthy, organic growth on that of your garden? 

A gardening book unlike anything you’ve read before:

– A celebration of the quiet joy of gardening, and the importance of delighting in nature’s wonders.
– A season-by-season reflection of the garden’s rhythms and our place within them.
-An exploration of the natural processes at work in the garden and how tapping into them can transform both your gardening experience and your life.


In To Stand and Stare, Andrew Timothy O’Brien weaves together strands of botany, philosophy and mindfulness to form an ecological narrative suffused with practical gardening know-how. Informed by a deep understanding and appreciation of natural processes, O’Brien encourages the reader to think from the ground up, as we follow the pattern of a plant’s growth through the season – roots, shoots, flowers, and fruits – while advocating an increased awareness of our surroundings.