Grow Native Massachusetts: Conversation with Margaret Renkl
4-13-2025
Grow Native Massachusetts is delighted to host a conversation with New York Times opinion writer and bestselling author Margaret Renkl, discussing her book The Comfort of Crows: fifty-two chapters that follow the creatures and plants in her backyard over the course of a year.
As we move through the seasons - from a crow spied on New Year’s Day, its resourcefulness and sense of community setting a theme for the year - what develops is a portrait of joy and grief. Joy at the ongoing pleasures of the natural world: “Until the very last cricket falls silent, the beauty-besotted will always find a reason to love the world.” And grief at a shifting climate, at winters that end too soon, at songbirds growing fewer and fewer.
Along the way, we also glimpse the changing rhythms of a human life. Grown children, unexpectedly home during the pandemic, prepare to depart once more. Birdsong and night-blooming flowers evoke generations past. The city and the country where Renkl raised her family transform a little more with every passing day. How can one person make a difference amid such destabilizing changes?
Grow Native Massachusetts is a Lexington-based non-profit that empowers individuals to make a difference by creating habitat and climate resiliency in their gardens and communities through ecological practices, particularly adding as many native plants as possible. Exploring Renkl’s observations and themes of change, personal action, and hope, this intimate brunch chat will span topics from taking time to notice and appreciate nature right outside your door, to preserving and restoring wildlife habitat, addressing climate change, and making other difficult systemic changes in the way human beings live.
Margaret's books, The Comfort of Crows, and its companion journal Leaf, Cloud, Crow, will be available for purchase and signing at the event (courtesy of Little Bee Bookshop).
• The Comfort of Crows was selected as Reese Witherspoon's 100th pick for Reese's Book Club in Sept 2024
• The companion journal Leaf, Cloud, Crow was published, also in Sept 2024.
• Ann Patchett calls The Comfort of Crows "a howling love letter to the world"
Grow Native Massachusetts is delighted to host a conversation with New York Times opinion writer and bestselling author Margaret Renkl, discussing her book The Comfort of Crows: fifty-two chapters that follow the creatures and plants in her backyard over the course of a year.
As we move through the seasons - from a crow spied on New Year’s Day, its resourcefulness and sense of community setting a theme for the year - what develops is a portrait of joy and grief. Joy at the ongoing pleasures of the natural world: “Until the very last cricket falls silent, the beauty-besotted will always find a reason to love the world.” And grief at a shifting climate, at winters that end too soon, at songbirds growing fewer and fewer.
Along the way, we also glimpse the changing rhythms of a human life. Grown children, unexpectedly home during the pandemic, prepare to depart once more. Birdsong and night-blooming flowers evoke generations past. The city and the country where Renkl raised her family transform a little more with every passing day. How can one person make a difference amid such destabilizing changes?
Grow Native Massachusetts is a Lexington-based non-profit that empowers individuals to make a difference by creating habitat and climate resiliency in their gardens and communities through ecological practices, particularly adding as many native plants as possible. Exploring Renkl’s observations and themes of change, personal action, and hope, this intimate brunch chat will span topics from taking time to notice and appreciate nature right outside your door, to preserving and restoring wildlife habitat, addressing climate change, and making other difficult systemic changes in the way human beings live.
Margaret's books, The Comfort of Crows, and its companion journal Leaf, Cloud, Crow, will be available for purchase and signing at the event (courtesy of Little Bee Bookshop).
• The Comfort of Crows was selected as Reese Witherspoon's 100th pick for Reese's Book Club in Sept 2024
• The companion journal Leaf, Cloud, Crow was published, also in Sept 2024.
• Ann Patchett calls The Comfort of Crows "a howling love letter to the world"