photography | Muriel Murch

INTERVIEW by Leslie Lindsay: Muriel A Murch, Author of Harvesting History While Farming the Flats

Today, while perusing the riverwalk art festival in my town, I wandered into an artist’s booth filled with pieces inspired by nature. Barns and fields. Dirt roads, orchards. The artist was a self-taught electrician who decided he needed something ‘more,’ something other than being a nameless employee. He had a handful of business cards, each contained a glossy image of one of his many works. I was drawn to the one of a farmhouse and barn, a pastoral scene. Maybe that’s because I live outside Chicago, in a town that has grown into a burgeoning suburbia, but is dotted with the occasional farmhouse and barn. I regret I didn’t purchase his art, but my walls are full.

This is something I think Muriel A. Murch would appreciate, the merging of art with nature, complex with simple. Just because it’s ‘simple,’ though, does not mean it’s ‘easy.’ Weaving together Hollywood and agriculture, her upbringing in England, she chronicles food, family, farming, and friendship in such a way that feels not just full of life, but artful and poetic.

Organized in thirteen chapters with subheadings, plus a robust photo section at the end of the book, Harvesting History While Farming the Flats (Sybilline Digital First; March 2025), is a gorgeous, thoughtful book inside and out. A former nurse-midwife, Murch writes about her love of land, community, organic farming, the independent film scene, and so much more, it’s all juxtaposed by the sometimes troubling movement of urban development and Hollywood, which is anything but uncomplicated.

As I reach back to my own ancestral roots, I was so moved by Murch’s opening lines:

“Migration, moving away from one home to another, is sometimes voluntary, and sometimes forced. Quite often, we don’t know where home is until we are there.”

This was something I identified with. My ancestral family hails from the rolling hills of Kentucky, where they’ve farmed for well over two-hundred years. I feel a deep connection to the land, but also: beauty, hard work, and simplicity.

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Bea’s banner goes up at the Botanical Gardens

Each morning at 7.30 a.m. David runs across the terrace, knocks on, and then opens the door and calls out, “Granny”! For there is book reading to be done or green play-dough dinosaurs (dinosaurs are green at the moment) to be made before breakfast. But today David came early only to help Granny with her morning yoga and then left. He took his Mama off to Palermo, to his music class and then for Bea to hang the banner for her show that opens on Saturday at the Botanical Gardens by Plaza Italia.

So I’ve not felt this morning stillness since arriving in Buenos Aires two and half weeks ago. The early delivery of food crates for the restaurant down below have been stacked and we won’t hear more until later this afternoon when it is time to chop vegetables for the evening meals.

My Monkey – and sofa too

Lassie has come to join me as he (yes he) does everyday now. The ‘Abuela Dome’, as we have named the little studio, is a quiet place where he can rest his tired old body on the sofa, paws wrapped firmly around monkey.

This morning after laying my breakfast carefully out on the little table, I looked at every piece of china and food and saw memories alongside of breakfast.

Breakfast for one in the Abuela Dome

There is honey from our bees in Bolinas, and homemade strawberry jam made by Bea. The stewed apple are in one of two Johnson Bros, Indie bowls that I found at the street market at Plaza Dorrego one Sunday.

We got the money honey.

“It is an antique.” No, I first had that set in London thirty-five years ago. Does that make an ‘antique’? The petal-pink teapot came from the San Telmo Market when we first knew we would make a little home here. On it is the tea cosy I knit for the tea pot in the work kitchen of Tetro when the film crew were based in San Telmo in 2008. The bright and cheery butter dish was bought as a souvenir from our overnight visit to Uruguay last year. A surprise storm kept us there where we were lucky to be able to return to our hotel and ‘if’ we could find cash, still get a good deal.

The French Jacques Cout un Jandin …en plus milk jug came from a small village shop in Corsica. We went to visit old friends for the weekend and stayed on in their villa for ten days after their return to Paris, celebrating our 25th wedding anniversary. One afternoon a big thunder storm came across the bay and we stood naked, watching from the tall glass veranda doors, mesmerized as the darkening clouds and rain came closer and closer to finally wash over us and leave a calming stillness in its wake.

The Heirloom Royal Albert tea cup and plate belonged to my mother-in-law Katharine. I remember her at the end of a long day in New York City, sipping her tea while often smoking a cigarette. If my husband’s memory is correct this tea-set would have been from her mother, Mary Elizabeth Scott and probably sent as a wedding present from England to Mary Elizabeth MacCallum on her marriage to Thomas Beckett Scott in Canada. The tea-set was soon packed up carefully and taken to Ceylon in 1893 where she and her husband worked as medical missionaries, directing the Green Memorial Hospital and starting a nursing school. In 1913 Mary and Thomas retired and returned to the States where, until 1925, they ran the Walker Missionary Home at Auburndale, Mass, caring for the children left behind from other missionary workers.

Tea time, on another continent, with another generation

How much of the set made it back from Ceylon, now Sri Lanka? Did Mary Elizabeth sit at the end of her day and draw comfort from the delicate china as well as the tea, as did her daughter Katharine? After Mary died in 1941 was the tea-set divided up between her four daughters? Who got the tea pot, milk jug and sugar bowl?

This day began with old memories and ends with new. Lassie has returned to the sofa to hug his monkey. Beatrice joins me in our quiet catch-up ritual, sipping our late afternoon tea in San Telmo, Buenos Aires.

The little tea-set has traveled many miles over many years, bringing comfort along with tea to four generations of women. We have been blessed and are grateful.