Contemplative Gardening

Pamela Dolan is the rector of the Episcopal Church of St. Martin in Davis, California and is an active gardener. She started the Shepherd Farm Garden in suburban Missouri, which gave away thousands of pounds of produce to food-insecure households. Her religion writing has been featured in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Pamela is a graduate of Harvard Divinity School and holds a doctorate in ministry from Sewanee-The University of the South. She lives in Woodland, California.

Peter Raven is an American botanist and environmentalist, notable as the longtime director, now President Emeritus, of the Missouri Botanical Garden. He served as an advisor to Pope Francis on Laudato Si and was named a Hero of the Planet by Time magazine. He lives in Wildwood, Missouri.

“In the pages of this charming book, Pamela Dolan has vividly portrayed the very personal parts of gardening, those parts that bring us and our contemporaries into close touch with seeds, with soil, with revival and rejuvenation, and with all the attributes that make us feel our connections with the living world. . . . Nowhere more than by gardening and enjoying gardens, and beyond them, all of nature, can we appreciate more completely that we are part of a greater whole, one that comprises all life on Earth, and one that we continue to degrade and destroy at our peril.”
—From the Foreword by Peter H. Raven, President Emeritus, Missouri Botanical Garden, St. Louis, Missouri