5 books like My Garden

As primarily ornamental gardeners, we’ve fallen back on the old excuse about tomato plants being ugly as the reason why we don’t do edible gardening. It’s a lazy excuse! The Beautiful Edible Garden shows that its titular premise is so not an oxymoron. And it hits the two things we look for most in a garden design book, which are: (1) hyperspecific plant recommendations and (2) solid design principles we can learn from and put into action. Through lucid, inviting instructions and scrumptious photos, The Beautiful Edible Garden offers gold like how to select “anchor plants” to establish structure in a landscape, blueberries and culinary sweet bay being top picks. And the transformational effect of planting a “focal point” plant — which has us hankering to bring in a persimmon tree. 

Blending Thomsen’s signature humor with her rockin’ expertise, Kiss My Aster is the book you give to your cool friend who just moved into a house with a yard. This raucously illustrated guide gets into the soup-to-nuts of designing a garden — from the different types of soil and drainage essentials to the best vines to plant to why you might need a Japanese maple. (“Or six.”) Learn how to handle pests, and see what Thomsen wears when she’s weeding and deadheading versus when she’s demolishing, digging, and planting. Designwise, the book shows you irreverent ways to play with tall plants, textured foliage, and one-off “specimen plants.” It’s also opinionated — guiding you to a more sustainable gardening life and away from tired lava rocks. 

What if your garden is completely indoors? This coffee table book encapsulates the #plantparenthood aesthetic (love it or hate it) of houseplants mobbed together and houseplants punctuating smooth, sunlit interiors. What gives Urban Jungle real cred though are its specific plant recommendations and care tips. It’s instructive to see what plants you can pair (or herd) together in similar spots — like an opuntia in a super-bright window paired with a huge Dracaena reflexa lurking five feet away. And indeed a fiddle-leaf fig, snake plant, kentia palm, Pilea peperomioides, schefflera, and spider plant all gathered together not only make sense light-wise but are an intriguing study in contrasting textures. It also inspired us to put a palm in front of a warmly colored accent wall.

One of the GOATs of garden design, Sackville-West wrote a gardening column in The Observer from 1947 to 1961, and those discursive, dishy columns are compiled in this book. Twelve chapters for twelve months make this massive topic easier to enter, but Sackville-West's unpretentious yet opinionated writing already hooks you instantly. In this book, you can conspire on a “green, grey, and white garden” and learn exactly what plants and hardscaping you need. In the May chapter, find a radical way to grow clematis (horizontally instead of vertically) with a quick DIY. Sackville-West argues for the design benefits of her recommendations (for the clematis, enjoying the upturned flowers without craning your neck). But knowing many of these principles were applied to the famed Sissinghurst garden is all the convincing we need. 

One Name: River Wilde.

There is so much to say about this book. This is absolutely not your typical rockstar romance. River Wilde is so much greater than that. The connection between River and Dahlia is instant, but untimely. Connected took me on a wild ride and skyrocketed to my favorites. Not to mention, after devouring it, I messaged the author for her permission to have River as a cameo in my series.