Nature’s Acre — Press Pack
Information, images, interview material, and book details for media, podcasts, festivals, reviewers, libraries, and booksellers.
Book page: Nature’s Acre
Buy link: Buy it here
Full media coverage: Press & Media
Selected recent coverage
A small selection of recent reviews, interviews, and features connected to Nature’s Acre. For the full rolling list of coverage, visit the main Press & Media page.
- LMFM – Late Lunch with Gerry Kelly — Interview discussing the story of the walled garden, biodiversity, and the book. Listen
- Chris Gibson Wildlife — Full review of Nature’s Acre. Read review
- GardenRant — “Most sustainable gardening advice doesn’t survive a real garden.” Read article
- Sonairte National Ecology Centre — Launch event and related promotion for Nature’s Acre. See coverage
- Wings Magazine / BirdWatch Ireland — Spring 2026 review mention. View issue details
Why this story matters
Nature’s Acre tells the story of how a neglected Victorian walled garden in Stamullen, Co. Meath, became a place for wildlife, organic growing, education, and community action.
At a time of growing interest in biodiversity and wildlife-friendly gardening in Ireland, the book offers a hopeful, practical story about what can happen when land is cared for with nature in mind.
Key line: “Every acre is nature’s acre — we just look after it for a short time.”
From book to wider initiative
The garden project behind Nature’s Acre became part of the wider GardeningWell initiative in Stamullen and beyond, linking wildlife gardening, education, and community action.
- More than 30 schools reached through seed giveaways and garden education projects
- 9 Scout groups involved in biodiversity planting and pollinator projects
- Thousands of sunflower seeds distributed annually for school and community growing
- Over 200 pollinator planters delivered to older adults through intergenerational projects
- A school programme launched in the restored Victorian walled garden
- Local biodiversity projects including hedgerow planting, pocket woodland creation, and wildflower meadows
- Homeowners rewilding part of their gardens
These activities show how the ideas in the book have grown into real local action.
Quick facts
- Title: Nature’s Acre
- Subtitle: An Irish Garden Memoir of Making a Place Where Life Grows
- Author: Ciarán De Buitléar
- Genre: Memoir / Nature Writing / Irish place-based nonfiction
- Setting: Stamullen, County Meath, Ireland (Spring 2020 onwards)
- Formats: Paperback · eBook
- Publication date: December 10, 2025
- Page count: 104 pages
- ISBN (paperback): 9781919392813
- ISBN (eBook): B0G67C3YN4
- Editor: Cynthia S Reyes
- Press contact:
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Book launch
Nature’s Acre was launched at Sonairte National Ecology Centre, Co. Meath, in March 2026.
The event featured a public talk on the restoration of the Victorian walled garden, biodiversity, community involvement, and the story behind the book.
Attendance: approximately 45 people.
One-line hook
A lockdown phone call gives a tired Irish father the keys to a neglected walled garden — and the work of bringing it back becomes a quiet, stubborn recovery story where wildlife, neighbours, and community arrive as the garden comes alive again.
Short description
Nature’s Acre is a memoir set in Ireland during Spring 2020. A phone call draws Ciarán De Buitléar into an overgrown Victorian walled garden and a project that changes his family and his community. Part nature writing, part recovery story, it’s about attention, physical work, and making space for life to return — both inside a ten-foot wall and inside a person.
Long description
In early 2020, as lockdown tightens around a small Irish town, Ciarán De Buitléar finds himself retreating into the quiet routines of home — the greenhouse, the garden, the small steadying rituals of growing things. Then the phone rings. A woman offers him something he’d been searching for for years: land to grow on. But it isn’t an allotment. It’s a Victorian walled garden hidden behind ten-foot brick walls in the centre of Stamullen, Co. Meath — a place he has walked past hundreds of times without knowing what was inside.
Nature’s Acre follows what happens next: first cuts through the overgrowth, plans made at the kitchen table, compost bins christened “the Taj Mahal”, tomatoes that refuse to behave, bodies that ache, projects that teeter, and the slow transformation of a neglected space into something shared. This is not a how-to manual. It’s a lived story about recovery through attention, making room for wildlife, and how a patch of earth can become a commons — a place with a name, held by many hands.
Positioning
It is: memoir · Irish nature writing · community story · recovery through making
It is not: a practical gardening guide (though real gardening and wildlife knowledge is embedded in the story)
Key themes
- Recovery through attention and physical work
- Fatherhood, family life, and building something together
- Community effort and belonging rooted in place
- The shift from tidy control to living systems
- Wildlife returning when a space is allowed to breathe
- Grief, friendship, and legacy
- Hope that is practical (not shiny)
Praise for Nature’s Acre
“a family discovers the magical world of an old Victorian walled garden. Gardeners will love this book.”
“Ciaran has a gentle and sensitive approach to gardening with nature in mind, leaving wild space for our shared kin, and growing chemical-free food and native plants. It is the future of landscape design.”
“Ciaran has always strived to bring gardening to the people, and people to the garden. His passion for community gardens, space for nature and challenging conventional thinking is a breath of fresh air.”
“I would highly recommend Nature’s Acre… It resonated with my experience of communities coming together to preserve nature and build connection.”
Short excerpt — A Call
I step out the back door. A spring day, bright and sunny enough, making an effort, but not quite succeeding. It smells of rain and is not quite warm enough to sit outside on the granite patio. I retreat to the greenhouse.
Inside, it’s warm and still as if waiting for my company. The worn black parquet under my feet feels familiar. The hexagonal frame, though modern, evokes another age.
Outside the glass ferns and foxgloves crowd in, the latter a rosette of leaves with the promise of flowers to come. A maple I planted when we first moved here has grown from restless youth into comfortable middle age, sheltering the greenhouse on one side. On two other sides, a beech hedge still wears its winter coat, brown leaves rattling softly in the wind. Beneath it, wild garlic I planted years ago now spreads with feverish vigour.
Close by but hidden, the road. Life passes by, as it always does. I sit and open a paperback book, “Silent Earth” by David Goulson.
The phone rings.
Suggested interview angles
- The phone call moment: when a project becomes a turning point
- Recovery through small daily work (not big dramatic reinvention)
- Walled gardens: history, symbolism, and second lives
- Fatherhood and building something alongside children
- Community effort: how places gather people
- Letting wildlife in: what changes when you stop fighting nature
- Grief, friendship, and legacy
Suggested interview questions
- Why did that phone call land so deeply for you?
- What did the first day inside the walled garden feel like?
- What was the hardest moment to keep going?
- How did the garden change your family’s daily life?
- What surprised you about wildlife returning?
- How did community involvement change the meaning of the place?
- What does “hope that is practical” mean to you now?
- What do you hope readers feel after finishing the last page?
Press images
Downloads
- Press Pack PDF (1–2 pages, printable)
- Book cover (hi-res)
- Author headshot 1
- Author headshot 2
Contact
Press / reviews / bookings:
Location: Stamullen, County Meath, Ireland