Jo Ann Gardner

Jo Ann Gardner is a noted plantswoman, herb authority, hardy rose enthusiast, and an expert on biblical flora. For 30 years she and her husband, Jigs, operated a hand/horse-powered back-country farm at the end of a peninsula on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. It was this experience, living a lean life close to the land that inspired her many articles and books on country life, homemaking, preserving, and all aspects of gardening, with an emphasis on low-tech solutions for every problem. In the book they wrote together, Gardens of Use & Delight, she and Jigs also explored the esthetic dimension of developing an entire cottage garden landscape where very feature fits and seems inevitable, the principles of which they applied to their new home in the Adirondacks. In her latest work, Seeds of Transcendence: Understanding the Hebrew Bible Through Plants, she draws on a lifetime on the land to teach the Bible from 'the ground up', a technique that brings the text to life for contemporary readers.