One woman's slightly obsessed search for the history and meaning of compost.
'Beautifully written, funny and informative, this really is the first book to make compost seem sumptuous and sexy.' - MARY MOODY
Everything that lives must die. Everything decays. Life springs from death. These are the lessons at the heart of things, and at the heart of the compost heap. All of which would be almost too profound were it not for the fact that compost (like life and death) is also profoundly funny, earthy, at times revolting, often unexpectedly sweet, and always resistant to glorification.
Margaret Simons unearths stories about who we are, where we are in our history, our relationships to the earth and to each other, and the direction in which we might be headed - all through an examination of the humble compost heap.
About Margaret Simons
Margaret Simons' journalistic and writing career has always existed side by side with her gardening life. For years she lived in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales, where she kept chooks, had multiple compost heaps and was self sufficient in vegetables for much of the year. She shared this experience through the 'Mother Earth' gardening column which was published for many years in the Weekend Australian, before moving to the Age 'Sunday Life' magazine. She has written two novels, an insider's view of the Canberra press gallery (Fit to Print, 1999), a gardening memoir (Wheelbarrows Chooks and Children, 2000) and The Meeting of the Waters, about the Hindmarsh Island affair, which won the 2003 Queensland Premier's Literary Award for Best Non-Fiction. She lives in Melbourne with her partner and two children.