A passionate gardener, Simonds won a Green Thumb award in Kingston, Ontario, for her front-yard garden where a hedge of snow peas rubbed shoulders with perennial herbs and flowers. For ten years, she lived a pioneer existence on the northern edge of Algonquin Park, clearing the forest for a house, helping to raise a log outbuilding, growing and preserving hundreds of quarts of fruit and vegetables, slaughtering fifty chickens every fall, and making everything from maple syrup to soap on her kitchen woodstove.

Today she lives with writer Wayne Grady in a two-hundred-year-old stone house on a small acreage north of Kingston, where she is gradually converting two acres of lawn to gardens, growing thousands of seedlings every spring, many from seed she collects herself.She still grows most of what she eats in a garden of heritage vegetable varieties that date, as closely as possible, from the early nineteenth century when the house was built.

She is the author of the novel The Holding, as well as the works of literary non-fiction The Lion in the Room Next Door and The Convict Lover.