Twenty-six years ago, Barbara McLean, the young wife of a country doctor-to-be, set out with her husband for a hardscrabble, decrepit farmstead in Grey County, Ontario. The couple were complete beginners to farming, and while her husband built his practice, McLean struggled to learn the filthy and backbreaking tasks needed to make their property habitable.

Lambsquarters is her hymn to that patch of southern Ontario ground. Like her farm’s namesake, a garden variety weed with an eloquent handle, McLean’s memoir is about discovering the extraordinary in the common plants and animals that gradually flourished around her. McLean’s history ambles from subject to subject in clear, meditative prose. There are vignettes about crowbars, beech trees, and waiting for the school bus; about the vast crop of rock the ground spits up each spring.

Humans figure, surprisingly, only as secondary characters. McLean doesn’t even reveal her children’s names, and the neighbouring expert farmers are too abstractly described to form in the reader’s mind. The key characters here are plants, tools, and animals, the latter all little bundles of drama. Lambsquarters is really a series of enchanting portraits of fleeced, feathered, and furred creatures, and the book is worth reading for those alone. McLean exposes the maternal abilities of sheep, the tenacity of rejected lambs, the romantic follies of bluebirds, and the quirks of snakes, vixens, toads, and hardy farm dogs. She has the concentration of a naturalist, but she loves animals unconditionally, even the wolves and raccoons who threaten her livestock and make a shambles of her barn.

The occasional burst of choppy, mannered writing is initially distracting. But as she goes along, McLean hits her stride with long and rhythmic sentences that echo the natural cycles around her, allowing her wit and keen observation to shine through. The darkness of farm life creeps in – the isolation, sleet, mud, and cold, the endless responsibility, the trauma of stillborn lambs. McLean wonders why she stays. But she has put down such a wide root system that it’s clear she couldn’t thrive anywhere else.