I’m not an expert gardener, but I’ve been gardening for half my life. Each spring I can’t wait to start all over again. I love deciding what vegetables to plant in our community garden and tucking flowers into the flower boxes. The perfect Saturday? Lingering at my local gardening center and perusing the seedlings at the farmer’s market—the possibilities are endless! As temperatures warm, I begin daily tours of my garden, looking for signs of life, pulling weeds, and tidying up. I marvel as the tulips bloom, scatter zinnia seeds, plant dahlia tubers, water, and wait. Gardening is perfectly predictable, yet I’m captivated by it every year.
I wrote...
Dig In! 12 Easy Gardening Projects Using Kitchen Scraps
Grow your own fruits and vegetables from nothing but kitchen scraps! Rather than throwing away leftovers from food in your kitchen, you can use them to grow more. Learn how to turn a single sweet potato into a pot full of them. Grow a salad from the end bit of lettuce and a lemon tree from a single seed. Several of these projects require nothing more than a jar, a windowsill, and a few pieces of food that would otherwise end up in the trash or compost. Step-by-step drawings and photographs make it easy to follow along, and fun recipes will help you enjoy the fruits of your labor.
After a long day spent digging in the dirt, I like to treat myself by going to bed early to read Diane Ackerman’sCultivating Delight.
Ackerman is known for going deep on the topics of the five senses, love, and, in this case, her garden, through the seasons.
With meandering musings about what’s growing in her backyard and meditations on the everyday tasks involved in maintaining her plot, Ackerman transports me to a lush, verdant place, providing just the rejuvenation I need to return to my garden the next day.
“Ackerman has done it again … one of the most buoyant and enjoyable garden reads … uplifting, intelligent.” — Boston Globe
In the mode of her bestseller A Natural History of the Senses, Diane Ackerman celebrates the sensory pleasures of her garden through the seasons.
Whether she is deadheading flowers or glorying in the profusion of roses, offering sugar water to a hummingbird or studying the slug, she welcomes the unexpected drama and extravagance as well as the sanctuary her garden offers.
Written in sensuous, lyrical prose, Cultivating Delight is a hymn to nature and to the pleasure we take…
I have a small, mostly shady city yard, but I still haven’t given up hope of growing food outside my back door.
That’s where Emily Tepe’s book The Edible Landscapecomes in. With lovely photographs of real gardens and step-by-step instruction, Tepe walks me through how to successfully grow fruits, vegetables, and flowers side-by-side to create a garden that is both beautiful and productive.
The best part of the book is Emily’s 10 favorite lists, featuring plants she loves and recommends.
As the fresh food revolution sweeps the nation, more and more people are seeking out delicious offerings from local growers. We have had our fill of tasteless, woody tomatoes from the far reaches of the globe and have begun tasting again—thanks to farmers’ markets and co-ops—the real flavors we remember from childhood. Inspired by these events, people have started growing food in the most unlikely places, including rooftops, abandoned parking lots, and tiny balconies and backyards on average city streets. Individuals and families are taking up the trowel and discovering that gardening can be fun, fulfilling, and, ultimately, delicious. Far…
Every spring, I pull this book from my shelf before heading over to the garden center or farmer’s market to pick out plantings for my window boxes.
I use the ideas in this book as a launch pad.
Sometimes I try to replicate exactly what appears in a window box design that catches my eye, but more often I just crib off a color scheme or copy the rhythm of showy flowered varieties paired with pretty leafy trailers.
I especially love that this book provides ideas for all seasons.
When design magazines want new and fresh ideas, they turn to James Cramer and Dean Johnson. In Window Boxes, Indoors & Out these two gardeners, designers, artists, and stylists bring a wealth of talent and the freshest eye to the close-up pleasures of window boxes. The book spans a year of invention and innovation at Seven Gates Farm, the authors' nineteenth-century homestead and studio. The results are inspired ideas, hard-working advice, and more than 150 dazzling photographs of these delightful still lifes.
Given four seasons in which to flourish, this once spring/summer-only pleasure goes well beyond traditional garden planters and…
This beautiful coffee table book featuring views of children’s book illustrator Tasha Tudor’s gardens is a saving grace during our long, frozen winters in the upper Midwest.
Come late February, I’m done with winter and the bright flower-filled gardens on these pages transport me to a different season and time.
Tovah Martin’s narrative is just as inspiring, providing details about how Tudor is driven to create secret gardens that mingle her love of art with nature.
Tasha Tudor's poignant art has fascinated adults and children for decades. Her nineteenth-century New England lifestyle is legendary. Gardeners are especially intrigued by the profusion of antique flowers -- spectacular poppies, six-foot foxgloves, and intoxicating peonies -- in the cottage gardens surrounding her hand-hewn house. Until now we've only caught glimpses of Tasha Tudor's landscape. In this gorgeous book, two of her friends, the garden writer Tovah Martin and the photographer Richard Brown, take us into the magical garden and then behind the scenes. As we revel in the bedlam of Johnny-jump-ups and cinnamon pinks, the intricacy of the formal…
As a longtime fan of Barbara Kingsolver, I highly recommend Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, which chronicles her family’s experiences during their first year of growing and raising their own food on a family farm in Appalachia.
After living in Tucson, Arizona, for most of her adult life, Kingsolver moves with her husband, Stephen Hopp, and their two daughters to Virginia, in an effort to reduce their own impact on the environment and live more sustainably.
Between accounts of the successes and mishaps in the garden, Kingsolver intersperses thought-provoking essays about climate change and the state of the environment along with ways we might work together as a community to implement positive change.
She also sprinkles in delicious recipes she makes using the fruits of their harvest. This is a fascinating read!
"We wanted to live in a place that could feed us: where rain falls, crops grow, and drinking water bubbles up right out of the ground."
Barbara Kingsolver opens her home to us, as she and her family attempt a year of eating only local food, much of it from their own garden. Inspired by the flavours and culinary arts of a local food culture, they explore many a farmers market and diversified organic farms at home and across the country. With characteristic warmth, Kingsolver shows us how to put food back at the centre of the political and family…
I am adopted. For most of my life, I didn’t identify as adopted. I shoved that away because of the shame I felt about being adopted and not truly fitting into my family. But then two things happened: I had my own biological children, the only two people I know to date to whom I am biologically related, and then shortly after my second daughter was born, my older sister, also an adoptee, died of a drug overdose. These sequential births and death put my life on a new trajectory, and I started writing, out of grief, the history of adoption and motherhood in America.
I grew up thinking that being adopted didn’t matter. I was wrong. This book is my journey uncovering the significance and true history of adoption practices in America. Now, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, the renewed debate over women’s reproductive rights places an even greater emphasis on adoption. As a mother, historian, and adoptee, I am uniquely qualified to uncover the policies and practices of adoption.
The history of adoption, reframed through the voices of adoptees like me, and mothers who have been forced to relinquish their babies, blows apart old narratives…
Who Is a Worthy Mother?: An Intimate History of Adoption
Nearly every person in the United States is affected by adoption. Adoption practices are woven into the fabric of American society and reflect how our nation values human beings, particularly mothers. In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v. Wade, the renewed debate over women's reproductive rights places an even greater emphasis on adoption. As a mother, historian, and adoptee, Rebecca C. Wellington is uniquely qualified to uncover the policies and practices of adoption. Wellington's timely-and deeply researched-account amplifies previously marginalized voices and exposes the social and racial biases embedded in the United States' adoption industry.…
11,000+ authors have recommended their favorite books and what they love about them.
Browse their picks for the best books about
gardening,
gardens,
and
design.
