Hi! I’m Mara Leigh. Palimpsest Garden is where I ruminate about nature, art, literature, and life as well as the spaces where they intersect.

Thanks for visiting!

All writing and photographs on Palimpsest Garden (palimpsestgarden.com) are created by me and cannot be used, reprinted, distributed or published elsewhere on the web or in print without my permission.

Fresh picked strawberries from our patch, early summer.

From Home is Where We Harvest

I have rarely lived anywhere, nor has my husband, without digging a shovel into the earth and planting seeds. Any little plot will do. Home is where we harvest.

Our garden is urban. The sound of traffic can be heard while we pick okra, Cherokee Purple heirloom tomatoes, strawberries, blueberries, figs.

All gardens are a sort of palimpsest. Year after year, season after season, the soil is cleared, the previous harvest devoured, erased to allow for the next. Traces of its previous incarnation lie barely visible to the eye in the chemistry of the soil’s flesh. It is a constant cycle of erasure and reimagining. Hunger and creativity join in matrimony with the planting of each seed, each ingredient plucked from the vine, dug from the earth.

We feel most alive when participating as creative custodians to our little corner, quarter of an acre, of the planet. We would feel lost without it.  It forces us to touch the earth.