Seasons in My Garden

In Seasons in My Garden, award-winning writer Sr. Elizabeth Wagner reveals how tending to a garden in her Maine hermitage brought her to a deeper understanding of what it means to have faith, love others, and hope in the mercy of God. Her keen eye for the most intricate details of nature will help you find a path that brings you closer to God as well.

Sr. Wagner believed God was calling her into deeper contemplation, so she built a hermitage in the Maine wilderness in order to ponder nature and become closer to God.

Seasons in My Garden is a thought-provoking series of meditations, written as Sr. Wagner watched her own monastic garden progress through the seasons. Her reflections invite you to look over her shoulder as she tends to her beautiful garden and meditates on the mysteries of God’s creation and how it corresponds with her own life.

In this captivating book, you will relate to Sr. Wagner as she struggles with feelings of a cold heart—just as her garden lay frozen under a foot of snow—and realizing that God was working to renew her spirit. As sudden storms threatened to destroy her hard work, Sr. Wagner will help you understand that careful preparation of the soul will help you resist the temptation to resent others.

Seasons in My Garden intricately weaves insights from Sr. Wagner’s own growth through the seasons with spiritual guidance and an understanding that patient tending to your soul will help you grow into a beautiful garden that God can use to reflect his glory.

Features & Benefits

Sr. Elizabeth Wagner’s work has appeared in a variety of periodicals, includingCatholic Digest, Capital Weekly, and Willow Review, where she won the prize for nonfiction in 2011.

Spiritual meditation through creation is a long-standing contemplative tradition in the Western Church represented by writers such as Thomas Merton and St. Augustine.

Sr. Elizabeth Wagner lives a contemplative life of prayer and solitude at Transfiguration Hermitage, a semi-eremitical community she founded that follows the Rule of St. Benedict. Sr. Wagner is a hermit, writer, spiritual director and retreat leader. She also serves as formation director, gardener, and groundskeeper of the hermitage.

Raised on a farm in Connecticut, Sr. Wagner graduated with a degree in humanities from Shimer College in Illinois. She was attending Andover Newton Theological School when she found her Catholic faith and her love of contemplative prayer. She then entered a Carmelite monastery, but left in search of more solitude. Sr. Wagner also served as adjunct professor of Christian spirituality at Bangor Theological Seminary.

She regularly writes for the quarterly newsletter of the Hermitage and has written book reviews and essays for a number of religious and literary publications. Sr. Wagner was awarded Willow Review’s 2011 award for nonfiction. She is a member of the American Benedictine Academy, Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance, and the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens.

She lives in Windsor, Maine.