Celebrated gardener, author and speaker Des Kennedy will present a slide show, The Gardens of Ireland, and a humorous monologue from his book The Passionate Gardener, at 1 pm on Saturday, April 6 at Patricia Theatre.
Five years ago he spoke to a sold-out crowd at the Patricia and Powell River Garden Club feels fortunate to have him visit for a second time.
The author of eight books, Kennedy has been nominated three times for the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour. His books have been described as “howlingly funny,” “a rare delight,” “beautifully written, funny and hopeful,” and having been “woven together by a master craftsman.”
The Passionate Gardener contains many of the horticultural satires for which Kennedy is known on the garden club and garden show circuit.
His most recent book is a memoir: The Way of a Gardener: A Life’s Journey. Spiced with irreverence and an eye for the absurd, it describes his personal pilgrimage from a childhood of strict Irish Catholicism in Britain, through eight years of training in a monastic seminary, then the social upheavals of the 1960s, to a new life of symbiosis with the earth that is as profoundly spiritual as past religious rituals. The memoir ranges over environmental activism, aboriginal rights, writing for a living, amateur wood butchery, the protocols of small community living and the devilish obscenity of a billy goat at stud.
Over the years, Kennedy has contributed countless articles on environmental issues, gardening and rural living to a wide variety of publications in North America, including seven years as gardening columnist for the Globe and Mail. He has hosted tours of the gardens of Ireland, New Zealand, China and England. He has been active for many years in environmental and social justice issues, including co-organizing the civil disobedience campaign in Strathcona Provincial Park in 1988 and getting arrested at Clayoquot Sound in 1993. He has worked as a land claim consultant for first nation bands in north-central BC and was a founding director of a community land trust on Denman Island. He is currently at work on a new gardening book and a novel.
Tickets are $15 available at Mother Nature, Springtime Garden Centre, Breakwater Books and Coffee and Eternal Seed Garden Centre.
