As someone who finds time spent outdoors in every season to be a source of deep spiritual nourishment, and as a priest whose life is shaped by the seasons of the Church Year, I was excited to encounter Matt Miller’s Leaves of Healing: A Year in the Garden. The book is a series of essays that form an extended reflection on the church year and gardening. They are rooted in Miller’s own experiences, as a churchgoing permaculture gardener, of inhabiting both spaces over the course of one year. His reflections invite the reader to encounter the beauty and power of the eternal in the repetitive cycles of garden time and church time by dwelling within their respective rhythms, together: “If our passage through the year is grounded in a time beyond time, then the annual cycles we process through will… ground us ever more deeply in the peace of eternal things.”

Miller excels at showing just as much as telling throughout the book, greatly strengthening this central invitation. His vivid descriptions allow the reader to imagine joining him in the tedium of fruit tree pruning, gazing at the New Fire of Easter, or pondering the Tree of Life. Beyond mere words, however, Miller’s ability to both show and tell is also embedded in the book’s very organization.

The essays are ordered chronologically according to the yearly timeline of his temperate Northern Hemisphere garden, starting with spring. From there, however, Miller divides and organizes the year not according to a gardener’s way of keeping time, but according to liturgical time, by the seasons and holy days of the (Western) Church Year. In this way, he begins his year with Ash Wednesday, moving through Epiphany to the cycle’s end. The experience of reading the book mirrors Miller’s movement through and reflections on the rhythms of garden and church, drawing the reader into both cycles.

As he reflects on each slice of liturgical time and the period of garden time in which it occurs, some themes naturally emerge: yearnings for a sense of place, rootedness, and community; the mysteries of life, death, Incarnation, and Resurrection; the world’s brokenness and the great and blessed hope for its renewal in God; the ascetic cultivation of Christian virtue; structures of justice and injustice, and so much more.

But while common themes arise and run through the chapters, this unity does not feel artificial. There is a sense of openness, even playfulness with which Miller follows various associations to see where they lead, letting them direct his reflections. He freely weaves together a wide range of sources and experiences from different times, places, and disciplines—from Faithful Elephants to the Book of Common Prayer, from a painting in an art museum to images of Miller’s father by the hearth, from timeless buffalo stampedes to the New Heaven and New Earth. In the chapter “Palm Sunday: A Greeting in Leaf-light,” he focuses specifically on the significance of leaves in the Palm Sunday narrative and liturgy, connecting that to the manifold roles of leaves as sites of photosynthesis, as shade, as litter, and in permaculture gardens and forest ecosystems. The approach is refreshing, serving as a reminder that the entirety of the created order is involved in the story of redemption.