Beresford-Kroeger - The Sweetness of a Simple Life

A Garden for Life

Arboretum America: A Philosophy of the Forest

Time Will Tell

The Global Forest

Arboretum Borealis: A Lifeline of the Planet

PUBLISHED BY RANDOM HOUSE CANADA

Copyright 2013 Diana Beresford-Kroeger

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2013 by Random House Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited.

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Random House Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Beresford-Kroeger, Diana
The sweetness of a simple life / Diana Beresford-Kroeger.

Includes bibliographical references.

eISBN: 978-0-345-81297-1

1. Conduct of life. 2. Simplicity. 3. Home economics. 4. Traditional medicine. I. Title.

BJ1595.B47 2013 646.7 C2013-900754-7

Cover design by CS Richardson
Cover, end paper, and title page images: musicman and gst, both
Shutterstock.com

v3.1

This book is dedicated to Money Bags,

Douglas Alexander Hart,

who wanted and got the skin off my custard.

Life has become complicated, and this complication is not necessary. Everybody needs time for themselves. The daily swirl of constant activity that we subject ourselves to steals our time. Time is our most precious possession. To give somebody your time is to give him or her part of that precious thing. You can only offer such a gift by simplifying your life so you have time for yourself and more, again, to give away.

It is only through living simply that we will be able to navigate the future. Adopting simplicity will streamline your life, your health and your mind. Your children will benefit and even the people who work with and around you will reap rich rewards in empathy and more human contact. Marriages benefit from simplicity; love feeds us all, just love, simple and supreme. Our lives should be filled with time for it. Your children are waiting for it. Even your pet is waiting for that extra little pat, today.

I have written this book to help you reset the clock. Each essay is built on science, a practice I have spent my life pursuing. In some ways I believe that science has stolen the innocence out of modern life, but without it we would not have all the improvements of everyday living, ease of transport and communication. We are all stuck in that forward momentum of science, but with each essayon the health of your body, the food you choose to eat, your hearth and household, your backyard and garden and the world all around youI am offering you a new wellspring of simplicity to use to your advantage. Each such choice and change helps simplify and strengthen the larger environment we all share.

Let me tell you a little about myself (the rest you will just have to guess from what I do not say). I was orphaned in Ireland as a young child, an aristocratic mongrel. In my mothers family were the ancient kings of Munster, Ireland. My father was a scion of the great Beresford family, which includes earls and lords in both Ireland and England. The judge was afraid to plant such a child in a Magdalene laundry orphanage and asked me into his chambers for my advice. Opting to stay with relatives, I went to live with a bachelor uncle, my mothers brother, Patrick ODonoghue, in Cork. He was a feted athlete, a scholar, and owned an immense library of first-edition books in Irish and English from all over the world. I dived into those books and some of them, with my uncles handwritten notes on philosophy, religion, theatre and poetry, sit breathing Canadian air in my own library now.

In the summers other relatives on my mothers side, all in their eighties, plucked me from Cork and brought me to the countryside of Bantry Bay and Glengarriff. They were Irish speakers and kept the Celtic traditions alive. Over three summers, they drilled me in Celtic culture and the ancient knowledge of the Druids, and tried to prepare me to survive in what they called the new world. They told me, You will be the last voice of the ancient Celtic world. There will be no more after you. In the fall and winter and spring, I went after education like a starving dog goes after a bone. I was a Beresford child from a prominent Protestant family in a Catholic girls private school. The nuns brought in the heavy artillery for me from the local university. According to my uncles wishes, I was as free as a bird to study. Every single night we took turns reading either physics, philosophy or poetry to one another by the fire of turf and coal. It was like we grew up together, in some way. He was advanced for his time because he really believed that women should be educated.

So I went to university, first in Cork, and studied for a double first in medical biochemistry and classical botany. In my final year I took over from my professor of botany who became ill, and taught the year. Then I did a masters in plant hormones and frost resistance. I went to the United States on a fellowship and studied for my doctorate in molecular biology with a minor in radionuclear chemistry. In Canada, I continued my research and I completed a diploma in experimental surgery. Most of my work in Canada has centred on hemodilution, open-heart surgery and the biochemical work in this area. I refused a professorship in medicine because I preferred to travel in my own line of thinking, which is looking at holistic systems. My friend, the Harvard professor Edward O. Wilson, has assured me that few people are prepared to study the bigger picture in science.

So this is where I am today. I live in Canada now, in a house my husband and I built in the midst of a large research garden of native plants and trees surrounded by 65 hectares (160 acres) of forest south of Ottawa, Ontario. I study what is all around me and I write, bringing together botany and biochemistry, aboriginal healing, traditional wisdom and Western medicine in my own particular vision in science. Most of my work is peer reviewed by university scientists and published by a university press for the world to use as foundational thinking, whether in medicine, biochemistry, physics or engineering. As luck would have it, my husband, Christian, educated in linguistics and mathematics, retired early, making us a team of two. His father, the late Hermann Wilhelm Kroeger, a deputy director at the Marshall Space Flight Center for NASA, was also one of my firm supporters.

My book The Global Forest was for general readers. It was my attempt to reawaken people to the deep connection we have with trees. As E.O. Wilson says, To speak of trees you speak for all of nature. I want to share my own lifes mission to propagate the mother trees of the worlds forests and to save the planet by replanting and tending such trees. In that book I wanted to show people why human health, the environment and trees are so inextricably linked. Everywhere I went when I was talking about that book, people asked me for ways in which they could help with saving and planting trees, but also for any little tips and practical wisdom I could offer to help them recalibrate their lives so they could live more harmoniously with nature. That is when I decided to write