$40.00 U.S. (trade discount)
No e-book has been authorized.
Clothbound
104 pages with 42 four-color photographs by the author
9.0″ x 9.0″ horizontal/landscape
ISBN: 978–1–938086–30–4
Published in December 2014
Distributed by Casemate/IPM
www.casemateipm.com
by Margot Anne Kelley
Old houses may not be haunted, but they retain many palpable vestiges of their pasts. And when Margot Anne Kelley and her husband, Rob, moved into an old farmhouse, they inherited that past as well as the property. On their one acre on Maine’s mid-coast, they learned much about the history of their home not by visiting the local historical society but by spending time observing the trees, plants, and grasses that had been planted by those who once owned their land. What they discovered is a landscape history that harkens deep into New England’s past.
In this field guide to other people’s trees, we learn about some of those past owners and their trees. Guided by Kelley’s evocative text and gorgeous photographs, we come to appreciate the same lessons that she did—that plants carry the past into the present, that we are part of a rich and interconnected world. In sharing her property with us, Kelley gives us a glimpse of her unique part of New England, encouraging us by her own example to imagine the many gifts we, too, inherit with a house and plot of land.
Intimate and informative, Kelley’s field guide is a joy to read and a gift to all who share her love of nature and of place. Like the plants that define her land in Maine, this book invites readers to recognize that we can be fully grounded in our home place.
About
Margot Anne Kelley was born in 1963 in Worcester, Massachusetts, and grew up in Clinton, Massachusetts. She received her B.A. in English at the College of the Holy Cross, her M.A. and Ph.D. in English and American literature at Indiana University, and her M.F.A. in media and performing arts at the Massachusetts College of Art & Design. Prior to receiving her M.F.A., she spent a decade as a faculty member in the Department of English at Ursinus College. She spent much of the next decade teaching photography and art theory at the Art Institute of Boston, before becoming the Interim Director of the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts in 2011. Currently, she is the executive director of the K2 Family Foundation, Chairman of the Board of ORION magazine, and an adviser or board member for a number of other nonprofits focused on finding creative approaches to living more sustainably. She is the editor of Gloria Naylor’s Early Novels (Florida, 1999) and the author of Local Treasures: Geocaching across America (Center for American Places, 2006) and a chapbook of poems, The Thing about the Wind (Fiddlehead Press, 2012). Her writings have appeared in Antipodas, African American Review, Interfaces, The Maine Review, Modern Drama, and many anthologies, including Ethnicity and the American Short Story (Routledge, 1997) and Quilt Culture: Tracing the Pattern (Missouri, 1994). Her photographs and other artworks have appeared in exhibitions and galleries throughout the United States, among them the Berman Museum of Art, Copley Society of Art, Photographic Resource Center, Center for Creative Photography, AXIOM Gallery, and Sam Lee Gallery. Her photographs are also included in corporate and private collections and in the permanent collections of the Portland (Maine) Museum of Art and Berman Museum of Art. She resides with her husband, Rob, in Port Clyde, Maine.
Praise
“Margot Kelley is equally eloquent in words and images. In getting to know her neighbors the trees, she has unearthed the history, folklore, and science of her place. Her curiosity is guided by love and intelligence, leading her to deep collaboration across time and species. The result is a portrait of the desire to lay claim and be claimed by one’s surroundings. One quiet acre here becomes a whole chorus of botanical voices that sing with the beautiful force of paying soulful attention.”
—Alison Hawthorne Deming, author of Zoologies: On Animals and the Human Spirit
“In this wonderfully appreciative investigation into the origins of trees in her own yard, Kelley documents nature as artifact—how we humanize simple local landscapes, produce ecologies of great inherent complexity, and shape places of deep personal meaning.”
—Joseph S. Wood, author of The New England Village
“Other People’s Trees reminds us of the histories around us. By revealing the invisible stories of the trees in her yard, Margot Kelley shows us the many layers of people and events that coalesce over time to make up where we live. How we create our landscapes. How we are part of it. This is a lovely book about our relationships with trees and the places we live.”
—Barbara Bosworth, photographer and author of Natural Histories and Trees: National Champions
“In A Field Guide to Other People’s Trees, Margot Anne Kelley shakes our boughs from the get-go, because most of her “other people” are previous owners of her one-acre home in Maine, owners reaching back to the nineteenth century. Unlike most stories in which trees and nature serve as backdrop to human drama, in Kelley’s book the trees and other plants in and around her yard are the central characters and the people the background. Through research and speculation about the herbal and cultural histories of the individual representatives of species growing around her home, Kelley brings her arboreal characters to life with wit and an admirable lack of sentimentality. When you get to know her hawthorn, her horse chestnut, her mountain ash, and other trees, plants, and grasses, you feel as if you’ve come to know a quirky cast of villagers. One of the most engaging things about this book is that Kelley loves to wonder about her trees and their ecological histories, and if answers to her questions don’t come, no worries! In asking and wondering, she invites the reader to wonder with her. As the book unfolds, we attain a rich portrait of a place that is home not only to a succession of human owners who have influenced the woody and herbaceous plants, but also to bees, birds, deer, and other residents. The book is replete with stunning insights and memorable lines. Among my favorites: “A real botanist would likely insist that the larches aren’t showing off then feigning atonement…No doubt she’d remind me that trees don’t think like people. While that’s doubtless true, trees and people do share something of the same history, both shaped as we are by slow-becoming.”
—Melanie Choukas-Bradley, author of City of Trees and A Year in Rock Creek Park
Slide Show
My Place
A while back, I had a few years during which I was reluctant to go to the movies—not because I had ceased enjoying them but because, for the duration of the movie, I forgot where I was. In itself, that was okay. But afterwards, when I walked outside, I’d be overwhelmed with fresh dismay that I lived where I lived. I moved as soon as I could. A mismatch between soul and surroundings is not healthy.
Since then, I’ve lived in a bunch of places that fed some part of my spirit. Some, like our current home in mid-coast Maine, offer so much that it feels churlish to wish that I could also be able to walk to a restaurant. Others, like Cambridge, Massachusetts, where my husband and I lived for a decade before coming to Maine, provided plenty to nourish the mind but no room to grow food and little chance to see the stars at night.
The idea of there being a single place that is “my place” is so appealing that I want to say I have one. And, in some ways, I could say that mid-coast Maine is it, because Rob and I plan to stay put. But the truth is, I don’t have one place; I have several. They are the places where I walk with ease, with pleasure—whether on a wooded trail or a city street, where I have a favorite coffee shop and bookstore, where I have good work to do and good folks to do it with. They are the places where the smells take me back, where I know the subway by heart or the short cuts along rutted dirt roads. Maine is definitely my main place, but I am fortunate to have several other places where I truly feel at home.
Copyright © 2014 Margot Anne Kelley. All rights reserved.