The philosopher Byung-Chul Han spent three springs, summers, autumns, and winters in his secret garden in Berlin, devoting himself to daily gardening in all weathers. For Han, gardening is a form of silent meditation, a lingering in stillness. It gives you a different sense of time. Every plant has its own time that is specific to it, and the garden is a space in which these multiple temporalities overlap and cut across one another. The longer he worked in the garden, the more respect he developed for the earth and for its enchanting beauty.

Gardening taught him what care for others means. Each organism has its own consciousness of time passing; each organism lives in its own micro-universe. Step by step, Han receded from himself and the world, moving closer and closer to an exuberant, divine nature which we are increasingly in danger of losing.

Through this rich meditation on plants, soil, gardening, and time, Han unfolds a way of relating to and tending the earth that is in sharp contrast to the brutal, incessant exploitation of our planet that we see all around us today.

"This is a book of exquisite beauty filled with the scents and colours of flowers and quiet changing of seasons in the author's Berlin garden. But more than that, it is a book of profound wisdom, a calm and deeply welcome antidote to the harshness of our troubled world."
Esther Woolfson, author of and Corvus

"Steeped in German philosophy and high culture, Han's reflections... will yield for patient readers subtle and lovely insights... This poetic volume will nourish gardeners and nature lovers."
Publishers Weekly

"Han turns so completely toward wholeness that his writing seems an alien arrival: the work of a being that loves wholly, uselessly, openly... It would be good and wise to enter that other time with Han's voice and try to live there for a little while."
Front Porch Republic

"Han's book, written in his characteristically crystalline prose, and sparklingly translated from the German by Daniel Steuer, calls august witnesses (Martin Heidegger, Rainer Maria Rilke, Friedrich Nietzsche, Bertolt Brecht and many others), to testify to the truths of what he discovered in the garden."
Charles Foster, Times Literary Supplement

Byung-Chul Han is the author of more than twenty books including The Burnout Society, Saving Beauty and The Spirit of Hope.