Margaret Roach

“I garden because I cannot help myself,” says Margaret Roach, who has written the New York Times “In the Garden” column since April 2020 and creates the award-winning website and companion radio show/podcast A Way to Garden. An all-new version of her acclaimed first book, “A Way to Garden,” was published in spring 2019, on its 21st anniversary. “Eat Pray Love” author Elizabeth Gilbert said: “Margaret Roach writes with intelligence, compassion, and most of all—sanity. Her work is a blessing.” Gardeners’ laments heard each fall like “the season’s almost over” don’t sit well with Margaret, who has worked to make her Hudson Valley, N.Y., landscape a 365-day visual treat. The garden welcomes some 70 species of birds each year, and a diversity of insects and other wildlife. Margaret wrote the 2011 corporate-dropout memoir, “And I Shall Have Some Peace There,” about walking away from “success” for a quieter life closer to nature, and “The Backyard Parables” (2013), blending garden memoir and how-to. She is the former garden editor of Newsday newspaper, and was garden editor then EVP/Editorial Director of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. (Erica Berger photo.)