“White Beech: The Rainforest Years” by Germaine Greer (Bloomsbury, 370 pgs., $34.95)

Germaine Greer, the Australian author of “The Female Eunuch” (1970), that garrulous classic of second-wave feminism, has been a lifelong agitation artist. In her heyday she tangled with William F. Buckley and Norman Mailer, her skeptical blue-gray eyes boring holes through to the backs of their heads. Her sound bites, lanky good looks and proclivity for posing nude prompted Life magazine to call her, on its cover, the “saucy feminist that even men like.”

Her aversion to being dull is unabated. In 2006 Greer threw icy water on the mawkishness surrounding the death of Steve Irwin, television’s “The Crocodile Hunter,” who’d been speared by a stingray. “The animal world has finally taken its revenge on Irwin,” she commented in The Guardian, labeling him a “21st-century version of a lion tamer,” one who trampled fragile habitats and manhandled all creatures, great and small. To borrow Irwin’s catchphrase (which she deplored): Crikey!

In some ways, that Guardian column was Greer’s coming out as a nature writer and naturalist, a late-life swerve that finds full expression in “White Beech: The Rainforest Years.” It’s an untidy and mostly lackluster book, sad to say, one that buries her rhetorical gifts under several inches of mulch.

“White Beech” is about Greer’s efforts to restore ecologically some 150 acres of often heavily forested land, a former dairy farm, in southeast Queensland, Australia. Greer, who is 75, bought the property in 2001 and says she has sunk millions of dollars into it.

She had seen too much environmental despoliation in her native country, she writes. “Give me just a chance to clean something up, sort something out, make it right, I thought, and I will take it,” she writes in a prologue. “I wasn’t doing it out of altruism; I didn’t think I was saving the world. I was in search of heart’s ease, and this was my chance to find it.”

There’s a sense that Greer considers this project one of her last acts. “I was 62 when the forest became my responsibility, with no idea how long I might be able to go on earning my living by my pen and tongue,” she says. “Our culture is not sympathetic to old women, and I was definitely an old woman, with a creaky knee and shockingly arthritic feet.”

Greer’s prologue is intensely personal (“I hadn’t been the center of my world since menopause shook me free of vanity and self-consciousness”), and it leads you to think that “White Beech” will be an intimate book, one that blends the story of her land with the story of her recent life.

I have a weakness, I should say, for good books about old age. I like to know how smart people have dealt over the long haul with marriage, with drinking, with sex, with young people, with toenail fungus, with work, with loss. “White Beech” isn’t that kind of book.

Greer focuses intensely on her property, coming to a full stop to explore and explain its exotic pasture grasses, its macadamia nuts, its choking weeds and its few remaining white beeches, huge trees that have been mostly logged out of existence in Australia.

This is engaging enough as it goes, but Greer is so interested in her land that she forgets to make it interesting to us. There are pages of deep, dry ecological history, with tangles of Latin names, on almost every subject she encounters. It’s all so shapeless that, by the end, she declares about the bird species on her property, “I would happily write about all of them, but this book has to end somewhere.”

“White Beech” does deliver a farmer’s market basket of pleasures. I enjoyed her observations about sexism and natural history, what she calls “the blokiness of botany.” This stems, she says, “from its needing to be done in Latin; girls’ schools were more likely to teach modern languages.”

She lights into eco-tourism: “Animals are not performers, and their behavior is not a spectacle.” She tears crankily into feel-good environmentalism. “There’s more to this than T-shirts and stubby holders bedizened with good intentions,” she says (a stubby, in Australia, is a beer), “and giving each other awards all the time.” She talks about filming frog and lace monitor sex and putting it on a website.

“White Beech” isn’t the best love story I’ve ever read, but it’s a love story, nonetheless. “I didn’t fall in love with native Australian vegetation until I was middle-aged,” Greer writes, “and then I fell hard, as middle-aged women do.”

She declares, “I am glad to be the forest’s fool.”