Wild Gardens: the Old Wisdom

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas has opened the natural world to millions of readers for over half a century. She’s as admired for her gift with language and her openness to experience as she is for her command of an extraordinary range of subject matter, where the non-negotiable core is always the individuality of all creatures.  

Now Ms. Thomas gives readers access to the sweep of her own life in the autobiography she calls A Million Years With You. The title honors her father who led their family into the Kalahari Desert in the 1950s to live among the Bushmen. It also reflects the enormity of Ms. Thomas’ view of how life -- and death -- connect everything in the universe all the way back to the Big Bang.

Sitting with Elizabeth Thomas in her New Hampshire office (once a barn on the farm her father bought there in the 1930s), she generously sketches the contours of her life with stories from earliest childhood on.

There are tales full of dogs and cats and one particularly frustrated au pair; a fearless teen delighted to encounter lions; a seasoned adult hiding herself in a pile of leaves to learn something about “who” a mountain lion is while others stopped at “what”. Stories also include the horrors of Nigeria’s civil war, the foundations of Ms. Thomas‘ two prehistoric novels and we all give a nod to her wonderous Christmas fable Certain Poor Shepherds.

As if frosting her life’s cake, she also offers us a glimpse of the autobiography’s entire chapter on art and discipline of writing.

Always full of surprises, this renowned author again opens to us places that too often daunt the rest of us. She shares a candid review of her own life, fully lived, plus a sense of the inner life of someone she’s spent a lifetime getting to know: Elizabeth Marshall Thomas.